More than a year after regulators cracked down on Wall Street’s flawed home-foreclosure procedures, authorities are stepping up pressure on debt collectors over a flood of lawsuits rife with unsupported allegations against delinquent credit-card holders.
State and federal regulators are increasingly alarmed that banks and debt collectors appear to be using faulty records in litigation against borrowers having trouble paying what they owe on their credit cards.
In some cases, authorities said, the paperwork and theprocedures have been so defective that borrowers weren’t even given notice of lawsuits against them until judges rendered default judgments for their failure to appear in court to defend themselves.
Those judgments opened the doors to wage garnishments, asset seizures and other actions that lenders and collectors could take.
The concerns of authorities echo the questionable records and so-called robo-signing in the nationwide foreclosure litigation, which led to last year’s $25 billion settlement with five of the nation’s biggest banks.
A broad investigation of the debt-collection industry by the California attorney general’soffice is focused partly on companies that buy delinquent credit-card accounts from lenders at a discount, then sue to get borrowers to pay up, said a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to speak publicly and did not want to be identified.
That investigation, which is ongoing, already led to the state’s civil lawsuit last month against JPMorgan Chase & Co., the nation’s biggest banking firm.
California Attorney General Kamala D. Harris accused the company and its Chase Bank unit of running a “massive debt collection mill” that flooded California’s courts with more than 100,000 lawsuits based on shoddy documents, including those signed by low-level employees posing as assistant treasurers and bank officers.
Meanwhile, attorneys general from more than a dozen other states have begun a joint investigation into similar issues in the debt-collection industry.
“We’re concerned about the debt buying that’s occurring, concerned about the quality of the information that’s turned over to the purchaser, concerned that there’s not a lot of due diligence on the names and the amounts,” said Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller, whose office is leading the inquiry.
“Some of the names are incorrect. Some of the amounts are incorrect. And sometimes the debts aren’t valid and are still turned over and sold,” said Miller, who led the coalition of state attorneys general in the foreclosure cases.
At least three federal agencies also are looking into the practices of debt collectors.
“We are on the verge of a sea change,” said Suzanne Martindale, a staff attorney in San Francisco for consumer advocacy group Consumers Union. “The writing is on the wall. … Consumers are being wrongfully pursued.”
William Black, a former top banking regulator, said the debt-collection industry is“massively screwed up.” Debt collectors, he said, “buy stuff on the basis of shockingly bad due diligence.”
Shoddy documents are “ubiquitous” in the debt-collection industry, said Peter Holland, an assistant professor at the University of Maryland law school.
“And if the big banks are not engaged directly in what [Harris]c is alleging, they are certainly selling off junk debt that falls into the hands of predatory debt buyers,” he said.
JSome debt collectors conceded that the industry has problems but said that many deals aren’t tainted by questionable practices.
Business, Pages 62 on 06/30/2013