What John Oliver Can Tell Us about Foreclosure Fraud, Sweat Boxes and the Profit Motive

Oliver had a memorable phrase to describe how this system catches people and won’t let them go: he called it a “f*** barrel,” and started a NSFW hashtag on Twitter to draw attention to it.

But I had actually heard a similar (and safe-for-work) phrase for this years ago: the “sweat box.” Law professor Ronald Mann coined it in 2006 to describe how the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) would affect consumer debt, and it applies to the criminal justice system now. The problems with this system also sound like the problems in mortgage debt servicing, which has been a focus here. It turns out that these issues are generalizable, and they illustrate some of the real dilemmas with privatization and introducing the profit-motive into the public realm.

The Sweat Box

First, the barrel/box. Credit card companies and other creditors really wanted BAPCPA to become law. But why? Mann argued that the act wouldn’t reduce risky borrowing, reduce the number of bankruptcies, or increase the recoveries these companies got in bankruptcy.

But what it would do is make it harder to start a bankruptcy, thanks to a wide variety of delaying tactics. The act did this “by raising filing fees, but also by lengthening the period between permitted filings and by imposing administrative hurdles related to credit counseling, debt relief agencies, and attorney certifications.” This kept distressed debtors in a period where they faced high fees and high interest payments, which would allow the credit card companies to collect additional revenue. Instead of trying to alter bankruptcy on the front or back ends, what it really did was give consumers fewer options and more confusion in the middle. It trapped them in a box (or over a barrel, if you will).

Mortgage Servicing

But this also sounds familiar to those watching the scandals taking place in servicer fraud as the foreclosure crisis unfolded over the past seven years. Servicers are the delegated, third-party managers of debts, particularly mortgage securitizations but also student debt. They sound disturbingly similar to the companies Oliver describes as managing municipal fees.

As Adam Levitin and Tara Twomey have argued, third-party servicing introduces three major agency problems. The first is that servicers are incentivized to pad costs, as costs are their revenues, even at the expense of everyone else. The second is that they will often pursue their own goals and objectives as the expense of other options, especially when they don’t ultimately care about the overall goals of those who hire them. And a third problem is that when problems do occur, they are often incentivized to drag them out rather than resolve them the best way possible.

Among other heart-breaking stories, Oliver walks through the story of Harriet Cleveland, who had unpaid parking tickets with Montgomery, Alabama. Montgomery, however, outsourced the management of this debt to Judicial Correction Services (JCS). JCS followed this script perfectly.

JCS had every reason to increase its fees and keep them at a burdensome rate, as it was to be paid first. It was completely indifferent to public notions of the county that hired it, such as proportional justice or the cost-benefit ratio of incarceration, such that they threw Cleveland in jail once she couldn’t handle the box anymore. And it economically benefited from keeping Cleveland in the sweat box as long as possible, rather than trying to find some way to actually resolve the tickets.

For those watching the mortgage servicing industry during the foreclosure crisis, this is a very similar story. Mortgage servicers can pyramid nuisance fees knowing that, even if the loan goes into foreclosure when the debtor can’t handle the box, they will be paid first. They are ultimately indifferent to the private notion of maximizing the value of the loan for investors, so much so that, compared to traditional banks that hold loans directly, servicers are less likely to do modifications and do them in a way that will work out. And servicers will often refuse to make good modifications that would get the mortgage current, because doing so can reduce the principal that forms the basis of their fees.

The Perils of the Profit Motive

There are three elements to draw out here. The first is that these problems are significantly worse for vulnerable populations, particularly those whose exit options are limited by background economic institutions like bankruptcy or legal defense. The second is that many of our favorite buzzword policy goals, be they privatization of public services or the market-mediation of credit, involve piling on more and more of these third-party agents whose interests and powers aren’t necessarily aligned with what those who originally hired them expected. Assuming good faith for a second, privatization of these carceral services by municipalities requires a level of control of third-party agents that even the geniuses on Wall Street haven’t been able to pull off.

But we see the sweat box when it comes to purely public mechanisms too, as we see in Ferguson. So the third takeaway is that this is what happens when the profit motive is introduced in places where it normally doesn’t exist. Introducing the profit motive requires delegation and coordination, and it can often cause far more chaos than whatever efficiencies it is meant to produce. Traditional banking serviced mortgage debts as part of the everyday functions within the firm. Putting that function outside the firm, where the profit-motive was meant to increase efficiency, also created profit-driven incentives to find ways to abuse that gap in accountability.

The same dynamics come into play with the profit motive is reintroduced into the municipal level. Our government ran under the profit motive through the 1800s, and it was a major political struggle to change that. Municipal fees are very much part of the reintroduction of the profit motive into city services. As libertarian scholar and Reason Foundation co-founder Robert Poole wrote in 1980 regarding municipal court costs, “Make the users (i.e., the criminals) pay the costs, wherever possible.” As Sarah Stillman found, this is what an “offender-funded” justice system, one that aims “to shift the financial burden of probation directly onto probationers,” looks like now as for-profit carceral service providers shift their businesses to probation and parole. Catherine Rampell reports this as a total shift away from taxes and towards fees for public revenues, and the data shows it.

This is the model of the state as a business providing services, one in which those who use or abuse its functions should fund it directly. And it’s a system that can’t shake the conflicts inherent whenever the profit motive appear.