Members of the General Assembly are about to consider several bills aimed at affordability. One of them deals with debt.
A default judgement is what happens when debt collectors show up in court, but the person they’re seeking money from does not. And it allows them to freeze bank accounts and garnish wages. Jay Speer at the Virginia Poverty Law Center says oftentimes debt collectors get default judgements based on nothing more than a list of names and dollar amounts they’ve purchased in bulk.
"They sue all these people, and they really don't have any proof that you’re the person that owes the debt, that the amount they’re suing you for is accurate or even that they have the right to sue you because it could be that your debt is not actually in that trust, and you can't really check that," Speer says. "Or they may have sold the debt to somebody else. That happens sometimes."
Delegate Marcus Simon is a Democrat from Fairfax County who has a bill aimed at fixing what he says is a broken system.
"What the bill does, essentially, says is, ‘Let’s lay down some basic minimum standards that you have to have when you show up in court and claim someone owes you a debt other than you served them with process.’ So, whether it's a document that proves that there was a contract and that there's debt that's been defaulted on or whether there's proof that you actually are the owner of it," Simon says. "Can you show some sort of chain of custody that shows that the debt went from the original creditor through somebody else and to you?"
He says the language of his bill comes from the nonpartisan Uniform Law Commission because predatory debt collecting has been a problem in several other states.
This report, provided by Virginia Public Radio, was made possible with support from the Virginia Education Association.
