New York Times, March 28, 2005

Though statistics are scarce, court records and interviews with military and civilian lawyers suggest that Americans who are heading off to war are sometimes facing distracting and demoralizing demands from financial companies trying to collect on obligations that, by law, they cannot enforce.

The law, the Servicemembers Civil Relief Act, protects all active-duty military families from foreclosures, evictions, and other financial consequences of military service. The Supreme Court has ruled that its provisions must “be liberally construed to protect those who have been obliged to drop their own affairs to take up the burdens of the nation.”

Yet the Relief Act has not seemed to work in recent cases like these:

At Camp Pendleton, Calif., more than a dozen marines returned from Iraq to find that their cars and other possessions had been improperly sold to cover unpaid storage and towing fees. The law forbids such seizures without a court order….

The Relief Act was also supposed to prevent the kind of situation that the Marines returning to Camp Pendleton faced when they discovered that their cars and other possessions had been sold to cover towing and storage fees.

“The act says you need a court order to do that, and you can’t get a court order without notice to the servicemember,” said Major Michael R. Renz, director of the joint legal assistance office there. “I’ve got six attorneys here, and each one of us has handled at least two or three of these cases within the last eight months.”

If a landlord or creditor, out of ignorance or intransigence, refuses to comply with the Act, the service member may not have the time or money to fight back, said Capt. Kevin Flood, a retired Navy lawyer.

“Sure, if you take them to court and win, you can even collect damages,” Captain Flood said. “But most of our people are not in that position. They are just regular Joes, and they don’t have the money to hire a lawyer.”

[Note: Legal officers point out that one reason servicemembers default on paying storage fees is that they have made arrangements for their vehicles to be stored during their anticipated deployment to Iraq or other hot spots. But when their tour of duty is suddenly extended, often with little notice, they are unable to get time from their duties to arrange for the payments to continue before their vehicles are seized.]

 

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