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From
Capital New York:
City Hall is owed nearly $1.6 billion in uncollected debt from fines and tickets, nearly half of which comes from related penalties and not the actual summonses themselves, a new report reveals.
The initial fines adjudicated by the Environmental Control Board, which handles summonses for 13 city agencies, amount to close to $483 million. Default penalties for failing to attend subsequent judicial hearings top $709 million, and interest totals more than $386 million.
Those figures are laid out in a recent, first-of-its-kind report from the city Department of Finance, which unveiled extensive details about the potential revenue that has long eluded city coffers.
The total of $1.58 billion the city has yet to collect stems from 1,456,919 tickets that were never paid.
From the
NY Times:
The Bloomberg administration announced new rules on Monday that are intended to change the way debt collectors operate by making sure they are going after the right people.
The new rules require collection agencies to provide consumers with the equivalent of an “original receipt” of the debt, proving the ownership and including an itemized list of accrued interest and any additional fees, said Jonathan B. Mintz, the city’s consumer affairs commissioner.
Until now, licensed collection agencies equipped with a list of debtors could contact anyone in New York City whose name appeared on a debtor list, regardless of whether that person owed money or not. The new rules, the commissioner said, will force original creditors to keep paperwork documenting a debt, who owes it, how old it is and whether it is still owed under the statutes of limitations. Debt collectors have recently been criticized by some judges for their tactics, and for the lack of documentation supporting their claims.
From the
NY Times:
...thousands of New Yorkers...according to a class-action lawsuit, are victims of a network of debt collectors who used fraudulent documents to surreptitiously win court judgments — all without the debtors’ knowledge.
The lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in Manhattan this week, takes aim at a decades-old practice known in legal circles as “sewer service.” This is when a debt collector fails to serve a notice of complaint and then files a false affidavit claiming the notice has been properly served. When the debtor doesn’t show up in court, the collector can then apply for, and almost always wins, a default judgment.
The first a victim often learns about the judgment is when a bank account is seized or a lien is threatened. The judgments can also ruin a person’s credit report.
Consumer advocates say the practice has grown in recent years, fueled by the recessionary rise in consumer debt actions and the emergence over the last decade of companies that buy up charged-off debt for pennies on the dollar, then seek to recover the full debt, along with interest, for themselves.
From the
NY Times:
The phone rang. A woman from a law firm representing a collection agency wanted to know if Mark Hoyte was Mark Hoyte, and he said he was. They were calling to collect.
Mr. Hoyte said he never had that credit card.
Then the woman wanted to know if his Social Security number ended in 92, and Mr. Hoyte said no, it ended in 33.
“She says to me, ‘Your date of birth is in 1972,’ ” Mr. Hoyte, 46, recalled in an interview.
Clearly, they had the wrong Mark Hoyte. But that did not stop the lawyers at Pressler & Pressler from suing him. They swore out a complaint and sent a summons to Mr. Hoyte, ordering him to be in court last Monday.
Then things took a rare turn.
The judge turned to Mr. Hoyte, who works as a building superintendent, and asked him how much a day of lost pay would cost. Mr. Hoyte said $115.
“Do you think that’s fair?” Judge Dear asked Mr. Wang. “That he should lose a day’s pay?”
“My personal opinion,” Mr. Wang said, “would not be relevant to the application being sought.”
The judge said he was prepared to dismiss the case and wanted Mr. Hoyte compensated for lost wages.
