This morning on the  Today Show (Lester Holt edition), an interesting story about how rental car companies deal with the problem of renters getting tickets, fines, whatever, in their cars.  Let’s say you don’t have two dimes when you have to go through a toll booth in your Ford Fiesta from Enterprise Rent-a-Car.  Eh, big deal, right?  Well, when you see a charge for $25 on your credit card 6 months later from Enterprise, you are not going to be pleased.

This is the  latest game for rental car companies.  On the one hand, if you get the parking ticket (or blow through the toll booth), what makes you think this ought to be their problem?  This was a nightmare for rental companies, who were forced to either track you down or eat the cost of your breaking the law.  Not nice.  Not responsible.  And not something that they should have to deal with.

But along came companies like Violations Management Services.  This was a very smart concept.  It proposes to turn a huge problem for rental companies into a profit center.  Get a $10 parking ticket (and keep it to yourself), and have your credit card charged $100.  Or maybe $1,000.  If you thought that you beat the system when you walked out of the rent-a-car place without them knowing about your “little indiscretion,” you got another thing coming.

These businesses certainly need to deal with the fact that they aren’t there to pay your fines.  And there are costs associated with this problem, managing this otherwise totally non-productive cost, tracking you down, obtaining payment.  There is no rational reason under the sun that the rental companies should eat these costs.

But turning civic violations into private profit centers is another matter.  Does 10 times the fine, or 100 times the fine, relate rationally to the wrong?  There is no connection between the handling of this problem and the amounts being charged.  Essentially, the rental companies are levying a fine of their own on top of the government’s fine.  And yes, they are turning what was once a problem into a new-found revenue stream and making some good money on the deal.

One invisible victim of all this: due process. It’s very difficult for consumers to get a copy of underlying citations in rental car violations, giving them little or no chance to invoke their rights to adjudication. It is alarming to think private companies can act as enforcement agents for municipal authorities without having to abide by normal due process procedures.

It’s also alarming to think about the perverse incentives created by the “summons incentives” paid by firms like Violation Management Services. Parking tickets are already often abused by local governments as hidden taxes; privatizing that process and adding even more to the cost seems positively un-American.

What should you do about it?  The best answer is don’t break the law and get the fine.  The second best answer is deal with it when it happens, rather than try to skip out on it.  If it never happened and you dispute that you deserve the fine, you are going to have a problem.  First, it can only be addressed where the violation allegedly occurred, and second you are likely going to have some difficult problems, both with getting the information from the rental company and dealing with the local authorities due to time bars (you’re too late to challenge the violation) and distance.

You can certainly argue the point with a customer service representative, who will no doubt apologize for the “inconvenience” and then explain the company policy that she is powerless to change.  So I have no fail-safe solution to offer, but just provide this tidbit as a public service.  Consider yourself warned.