Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/10/15/american-are-being-hit-with.html
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Actual vultures serve a purpose in the circle of life.
Debt collectors of this ilk… worse than zombies.
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Seems like the ‘time limit to appeal’ should be on the other party here.
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A bit of necessary pedantry: these are state governments doing this, not the federal government. As with tax debt, the states are iron-clad motherfuckers compared to the IRS. I had a dispute with the IRS over an amount of a few thousands bucks, and they could hardly have been nicer – they wanted (and got) the money, but the payment plan was generous and flexible (and I modified it more than once). When I had a dispute with the state, over a few hundred bucks, they reached into my bank account and charged me $35 for the privilege.
Always, if the state and the feds are after you, pay the state first. The IRS will always work with you.
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It’s hard to imagine that the amounts collected here are worth the effort. Is this one of those cases where a private company bought up a block of debts for some fixed sum and decided to enforce them?
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the time period to appeal expired long ago
How can the time for appeal expire but the time for the accusation not expire? This sounds distinctly unconstitutional.
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Sounds to me like a republican found a way to target poor and systematically mistreated people for abuse.
Just a little light erotic roleplay on a friday night for those types
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Fucking A. The state of California - without any prior notice - decided it was perfectly ok garnish my paycheck to claim $350 for unpaid car registration.
The thing is I had moved out of the state some 4 months before it was due, and I had already long since registered my car and got a drivers license in the state I had moved to.
It took me months of of back and forth with an unhelpful DMV and waiting to finally get my money back.
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Or at least Kafkaesque.
Whatever happened, it’s yet another one of the multitude of nickel-and-diming f*ckbarrel traps that late-stage capitalist America sets out to ensnare poor people.
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First it’s “Police databases contain the faces of nearly have of Americans”.
Now it’s “American are…”
Mark is testing my grammar OCD today.
Damn you.
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You past!
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From theguardian:
It’s hard for a reasonable person to see the point in a government agency harassing an elderly man for $5 a month. After the cost of billing and postage, appeals and case management, Illinois is losing money collecting from people like Pegues. That’s why state and federal governments are looking to new economies of scale offered by advances in predictive analytics.
In Illinois 2013 peak in collections, $133.3m that year
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I don’t know what BingBong’s CMS actually looks like, but a lot of Frauenfelder posts (especially the ones with videos) make me picture Charlie Chaplin being humorously overwhelmed by a giant steaming machine that involves a lot of frantic dial-turning and horn-honking.
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I’m pretty sure it’s just a fork/parallel of wordpress.
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Takes a special type of persons to go to work everyday knowing they are intentionally inflicting hardship and potentially ruining lives of families and persons.
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I feel like if these debts managed to go unnoticed for thirty years, the just solution would be to find whoever was in charge of the department which disbursed the money during that period and bill them for their incompetence.
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This is why I’m against states’ rights. That and the dogwhistling.
I don’t get the syntax here: “a zombie debt is a debt that is past its statute of limitations, not owed, paid in full, or otherwise contested,”
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I don’t get it either. I smell bullshit. I can’t tell where it is yet, but I can smell it.
I’ve lived in PA, TX, DE, VA and CA. The CA DMV is the 7th circle of hell. It’s awful!
I don’t know how or why, but the other states I’ve lived in made things easy.
In CA, they ran my debit card twice for my registrations (Mini Cooper and RV - $750) and I couldn’t get them to reverse one charge then and there. I had to wait for a week to get a check!
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