A recent decision by a New York federal court provides yet another example of the documentation-related challenges that creditors and debt buyers are increasingly facing in collection actions involving non-mortgage consumer debts.
In its opinion in Monique Sykes v. Mel Harris and Associates, LLC, issued September 4, 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York granted class certification in a case alleging that a debt buyer, law firm, and process service company had engaged in a scheme to fraudulently obtain default judgments against more than 100,000 consumers in debt collection actions filed in state court.
The complaint alleged that the process service company had regularly engaged in "sewer service" by failing to serve the summons and complaint. It further alleged that, after a debtor failed to appear in court for lack of notice of the collection action, the debt buyer and law firm would seek a default judgment based on a false "affidavit of merit" attesting to their personal knowledge of the "facts and proceedings" relating to the action and a false affidavit of service.
According to the court, the plaintiffs had established that the affidavits of merit were "generated en masse by sophisticated computer programs and signed by a law firm employee who did not read the vast majority of them and claimed to, but apparently did not, have personal knowledge of the facts to which he was attesting." The employee typically did not receive the original credit agreement for a particular debt included in a portfolio of purchased debts. Instead, the employee received a bill of sale for the portfolio that included sample credit agreements and warranties from the portfolio seller. The court noted that even if the credit agreement existed (which it often did not), the employee's standard practice was to rely on the warranties and database information instead of reviewing the agreements before signing an affidavit of merit.
The evidence showed that after producing the affidavits of merit in batches of up to 50 at a time, the law firm's employee would do a "quality check" of one affidavit per batch to confirm that the affidavit information matched the database information. If both sets of information matched, he would sign the remaining affidavits without reviewing them. The employee would sign as many as 350 affidavits of merit in any given week.
The plaintiffs also alleged that, because the defendants had regularly engaged in "sewer service," the affidavits of service that accompanied the affidavits of merit were also often false. According to the court, evidence showing hundreds of instances of the same process server executing service at multiple locations simultaneously provided substantial support for the plaintiffs' "sewer service" allegations.
In addition to claiming that the defendants' conduct violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act and New York's General Business Law and Judiciary Law, the complaint alleged that the defendants had violated the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act by filing false affidavits in the collection actions. The court, in finding that the plaintiffs had satisfied the commonality requirement for class certification, noted that there is conflicting case law on whether making false representations in court, rather than to the debtor, violates the FDCPA.
To assist clients in responding proactively to the current rash of documentation-related challenges being faced by the debt collection industry and creditors attempting to collect their own debts, Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Financial Services Group recently formed a Collection Documentation Task Force. The task force conducts extensive audits of collection procedures and counsels on best documentation practices. It brings together litigators with experience defending mortgage lenders and other consumer lenders in documentation-related lawsuits nationwide and regulatory lawyers with deep knowledge of the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s national bank foreclosure review process and federal and state debt collection laws.
Ballard Spahr lawyers regularly consult with their clients engaged in consumer debt collection on compliance with the FDCPA and state debt collection laws. As summarized in a prior legal alert, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has issued a proposal to supervise certain debt collectors and debt buyers as “larger participants.” The CFPB will soon be examining debt collectors and debt buyers who qualify as “larger participants” or who act as service providers to entities supervised by the CFPB, such as payday and private student loan lenders. We are currently conducting compliance reviews for debt collectors and debt buyers in anticipation of their first CFPB examinations.
Ballard Spahr’s Consumer Financial Services Group is nationally recognized for its guidance in structuring and documenting new consumer financial services products, its experience with the full range of federal and state consumer credit laws throughout the country, and its skill in litigation defense and avoidance (including pioneering work in pre-dispute arbitration programs). The group includes the firm’s Mortgage Banking Group, which combines broad regulatory experience assisting clients in both the residential and commercial mortgage industries with formidable skill in litigation and depth in enforcement actions and transactions.
