Hostility exists with regard to the use of secondary evidence to collect debts. Remember McCullough, where the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the claim that secondary evidence of forms containing an attorneys’ fees clause was insufficient to justify a claim for attorneys’ fees? Recently, the Missouri Supreme Court held that a debt assignee’s secondary testimony was insufficient to meet the business records exception to the hearsay rule — direct testimony from the assigning creditor was required. In CACH, LLC v. Askew, the Missouri Supreme Court addressed whether a debt assignee could authenticate the business records of the assignor/creditor in order to collect on that defaulted debt. The Supreme Court held no, explaining that, “a custodian of records cannot meet the requirements of [the business records exception to the hearsay rule] by simply serving as a ‘conduit to the flow of records’ and not testifying to the mode of preparation of the records in question.” The Supreme Court rejected the contention that payment by the debtor to the debt assignee estopped the debtor from arguing that the debt was not assigned to the Plaintiff, explaining, “CACH fails to point to any authority that states that a payee admits assignment of a debt simply by making one payment on that debt to the alleged assignee”.