In Schenectady, GE was notorious for their slow payments to vendors.
And even worse. One trick involved the terms of the invoices. Usually, you billed with a small discount if paid early, and then interest if you paid late. GE would pay late, and take the discount.
Most small companies working with GE learned to add several months interest into their quotes. Thus if you’d normally charge $1000, you’d charge $1046 as the base price and not offer a discount.
One problem I ran into in A/R is that many large companies were perfectly happy to sign contracts saying they would pay net-30 with 2% per month interest for late payments. But when I’d go to collect I’d hear something along the lines of “our policy is to pay in 90 days” and “we don’t pay interest penalties”.
Even completely ignoring any bad will, suing them is unlikely to get me my money any faster. And even on largish invoices the interest is too low to make suing really worthwhile. Meanwhile I’m getting heat from the GM since my 60, 90, and 120+ day receivables are creeping up.
The costs of enforcing contracts through the courts are high enough that vendors end up in the situation where there’s the contract-as-written and the contract-as-interpreted-by-BigCustomer and until the vendor has experience with a particular BigCustomer they don’t know how much ‘interest’ to bake into their quotes.
Eventually things work out but its a bit annoying, from an A/R perspective; and I’m not sure there’s any government cure that wouldn’t be worse than the disease.
To me that’s the crux of trying to answer the OP question. Reducing uncertainty in payments is likely a net positive (although it might reduce some contracting by the people who currently use that uncertainty to their benefit.) The how we do it matters since it likely costs. You can’t do a social cost to benefit analysis without the cost side.