Passing a bad check is a crime. Unfortunately it is not always a matter a local police department or District Attorney office wants to pursue. At the present time about half of all U.S. states have some type of "bad check restitution program" (these programs may also be designated as a "worthless check unit" or a "bad check restitution program."
Prosecutor offices that have a worthless check program often refer to it as a "diversion program." That is, bad check writers are "diverted" from prosecution if they pay off the worthless checks they have written. These programs are free to merchants and funded through the fees charged by D.A. offices.
District Attorney offices generally operate bad check restitution programs internally or externally. If the program is "internal," the prosecutor's office sends out the necessary collection letters and engages in the collection efforts necessary to require bad checks. Other District Attorney offices actually outsource bad check collection to a check recovery service such as NorthStar.
If you are a business owner, be sure to ask if a worthless check program is being outsourced to a third party agency. You can often guess whether or not this is happening by simply reviewing the worthless check service. Internal worthless checks programs often have many restrictions on the checks they accept for collection while third party agencies do not (here is an example). If a D.A. office is simply outsourcing worthless checks to a collection agency, you can do this yourself and save your business time because the D.A. office is only serving as a "middle-man."
If you are a business owner, you will likely need to file some paperwork with your local District Attorney (see a sample of this). Many D.A. offices send out "packets" of materials, and these can contain A LOT of material!