“The car was flagged for repossession by the credit union because her payments were short by 66 cents each month.”
Lakeland, FL – 19 May 2020 – A $3B in asset sized Florida Credit Union received undesired national press attention this week for repossessing a nurse’s car after offering her a loan modification and reneging after discovering that her loan was late as the result of a $0.66 shortage in monthly payments over several months.
Traveling nurse, Shelley Tanner, ended up regretting accepting help from her credit union after signing up for and, according to Tanner, she had been approved for an offer from her Credit Union to defer her March and April payments.
That modification application triggered an audit of her account, of which she claims that she was informed that she had already missed one payment, but the collections representative could not pin-point which payment.
Tanner claims that the representative would give her a month he had claimed that she’d missed a payment for, and she would quickly find the canceled check to prove she had indeed paid.
While she assumed that she was continuing to work with the credit union on finding the source of the delinquency, she stepped outside her home on Saturday night only to find that her car was gone. Tanner called police only to find that her 2015 Chevrolet Impala had been repossessed.
Tanner claims that she still hasn’t been provided an answer to which months the missing payment was from, so she turned to a local television news station WFLA’s “Better Call Behnken” for help.
Action didn’t come until after WFLA’s Investigative Reporter Shannon Behnken contacted the credit union, and within hours, a senior executive of the credit union called to conduct an audit.
Tanner reported that she had been told that the audit showed that the computer had flagged her account for a repossession because her payments have been short by 66 cents each month.
As the result of the unwanted attention and apparently minor delinquency, The credit union agreed to pay the $400 repossession fee and to have the nurse’s car towed to her driveway.
A credit union spokesperson stated that before repossessing a vehicle, the credit union will attempt to contact the member by phone, mail and even door-knock service to make payment arrangements.
Tanner claims that she was never contacted by the credit union preceding the repossession.
“Please be assured that while the State of Florida does not require prior notice of repossession, our goal is to help members maintain their vehicle. Before we move to a repossession, we attempt to contact the member by phone, mail and even door-knock service (which provides a hand delivered notice if the member answers at the physical address provided) so that we can work with them to make suitable short-term arrangements.”
Editors Note: Stories like this are common and the press rarely knows all of the details. Regardless, it is unpleasant, to say the least, being illuminated in such a manner. In the pandemic environment, we can expect that there will be much more push back from the public and greater scrutiny by the media on collections, repossession and foreclosure activity. These are the times to make sure repossession are truly warranted and be prepared to back it up. Minor payment tolerance issues and loss payee endorsements that trigger CPI placement can make for easy media headlines. No one wants to end up on a the frontpage of a national newspaper or on hundreds of internet media outlets as this one has done.
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