"Poinciana Villages, with nearly 70,000 residents and 23,000 homes, would be one of the largest cities in Central Florida if it were a municipality. Instead, it's one of the largest private homeowners associations (HOA) in the United States. But now the HOA is under fire for what residents say is a persistent and ongoing effort by outsourced debt-collection agencies to inflate back dues with thousands of additional dollars in legal fees and late charges. Some of the estimated 4,000-plus homeowners whose debt was sold — more than 1 of every 6 homes in the association — say they've never received a line-by-line breakdown of what those fees actually are. And by the time they're able reach someone at the agency, their late fees and legal fees have doubled, tripled, quadrupled and more. At issue, residents say, is the possibility of thousands of owners losing their homes because of ballooning debts that were originally only in the hundreds of dollars."
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Because there aren't enough stories of individual owners losing their homes in HOA foreclosures with bogus charges, so it is time for mass-production foreclosure, using private debt-collection agencies.
http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/osceola/os-poinciana-hoa-turmoil-20151219-story.html
3 comments:
The article is interesting and so are the comments. Clearly the commenters never grasped the fact that the HOA isn't collecting - it sold the debt for unknown amounts. All the junk fees, etc. are added on by debt buyers, not the HOA. Accordingly none of the money is going to the HOA. The commenters seem to have no grasp of this whatsoever.
This is not dissimilar to what happens even when HOAs retain the debt. Often the money collected is NOT going to the HOA. It is going to the vendors - who engage in similar tactics to pyramid up fees.
I wouldn't be surprised if people started torching houses to deprive the HOA vendors and industry of the ability to steal the owners' equity through the use of junk fees and foreclosure.
IC_deLight wrote “the HOA isn't collecting - it sold the debt for unknown amounts”.
In sort-of-but-not-exactly-related news,
Monday, December 7, 2015
Congress Orders IRS To Use Private Debt Collection Companies
by Paul Caron
. . . On December 4, 2015, President Obama signed into law the Fixing America’s Surface Transportation Act, or “FAST Act.” It provides long-term funding for transportation projects, including new highways, over a period of ten years. And as you would expect in a bill targeting highways and infrastructure, it also requires Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to use private debt collection companies. . . .
. . . Under current law, IRS already has the authority to use private debt collection companies to locate and contact taxpayers owing outstanding tax liabilities and to arrange payment of those taxes. Historically, farming out collection hasn’t worked out for IRS.
Under the new law, there’s little in the way of discretion: IRS is required to use private debt collection companies to collect “inactive tax receivables.” . . .
. . . Comments . . . Combine the governmental authority of the IRS with the annoyance and perseverance of robo-telemarketers and Mafia kneecappers. Gee, what could go wrong with this scenario?
Read the whole thing at taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2015/12/congress-orders-irs-to-use-private-debt-collection-companies.html
> robert @ colorado hoa . com said… “Monday, December 7, 2015 Congress Orders IRS To Use Private Debt Collection Companies”
Two years later, Instapundit.com reports that :
YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: The IRS Spent $20 Million On Private Debt Collection To Bring In $7 Million.
48 comments
posted by Glenn Reynolds on January 25, 2018 at 8:00 pm
The cognitive dissonance is amazing, since Professor Instapundit-Reynolds is one of those glibertarian advocates of privatization. e.g.
SHOULD’VE HAPPENED DECADES AGO, BUT THIS IS REAL PROGRESS: Puerto Rico to privatize its power system.
35 comments
posted by Glenn Reynolds on January 23, 2018 at 7:43 am
When privatization fails, it’s obviously another example of government screwing things up, and not the fault of the private entities involved. It’s like listening to those college campus communists rationalize the real world failures of communism by saying things like “communism is great in theory, it’s just that people aren’t good enough for it” or “[insert name of failed communist state here] wasn’t a true communist state”.
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