Paying all the fees for bouncing a check is costly enough.
Should you also have to put up with a private company tracking you down and demanding that you attend one of its costly personal finance classes to avoid prosecution?
In 2006, Congress passed a law that allowed district attorney’s offices to hire private companies to pursue bad checks that are too small for prosecutors to worry about.
According to cnn.com a company called American Corrective Counseling Services now has contracts to do just than 17 states.
ACCS splits all money it collects to cover the bad checks and fees with the prosecutor’s office.
But it also makes money from financial management courses that cost another $160, and that people who wrote the checks are required by law to attend at their own expense.
We’re not talking about professional criminals here. We’re talking about consumers who have bounced checks for as little as $14 being threatened with prosecution if they don’t pony up to a private company.
Jennifer Osborn, a California student who bounced a $92 check to her college bookstore, told CNN that the ASCS courses are “boring…pointless.” But the company’s contract with at least one prosecutor states those classes are its “principal business activity.”
My take: Hiring a private company to pursue bad checks isn’t all that different from having a collection agency pursue bad credit card debt. It’s unpleasant but probably necessary.
Allowing that company to profit from mandatory personal finance classes of questionable value is unpleasant and unnecessary. We need to put a stop to it.
(5 votes, average: 4.00 out of 5)
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