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A friend just sent me a report issued in June of 2008 by MFY Legal Services. The report summarizes a study (click here for the report) which found evidence of process server misconduct in the City of New York. It also presented several recommendations to the City of New York Department of Consumer Affairs regarding its oversight of process servers.
Evidence of Misconduct - MFY looked statistically at 180,177 collection cases in NYC. They found that only 8.6% of the defendants appeared in court. This means that in the other 91.4% of the cases the plaintiff could have taken a default judgment. This number was considered seriously low and evidence that many of the defendants had never been served and were, therefore, unaware of the case being brought against them. They also studied 91 cases in greater detail. These cases were all served by just 3 process serving companies. Here is a table from the report.
| Process Serving Company | No. of Defendants in Sample Who were Allegedly Served | Service by "Nail and Mail" | Service Upon a Person of Suitable Age and Discretion | Service Upon the Defendant by Personal Delivery to Him or Her |
| Company No. 1 | 30 | 17% | 83% | 0% |
| Company No. 2 | 27 | 93% | 7% | 0% |
| Company No. 3 | 34 | 18% | 64% | 18% |
Anyone who has been in the business for any length of time will realize that getting personal service only 6 times out of 91 serves is a highly questionable number. Combining statistics with information from 11 case studies caused the MFY researchers to conclude there is considerable fraud occurring by process servers in the City of New York.
Recommendations - MFY made the following recommendations to the New York City Department of Consumer Affairs, which is responsible for licensing process servers in NYC.
- Conduct comprehensive audits of process server companies and licensed individuals prior to renewal of their license every two years.
- Require process servers to designate DCA as agent for service pursuant to CPLR 318.
- Require record keeping for seven years rather than two years.
- Require process servers to record in their record book how they determined the residence served is the actual residence of a defendant.
- Immediately establish a joint task force with representatives of the Civil Court, DCA, consumer advocates, debt collectors and the process servicing industry to investigate the scope of the problem identified in this Report and to recommend additional solutions.
- Examine the results of the recent amendment to the Uniform Rules for the New York City Civil Court requiring additional notice to defendants in consumer credit transaction cases, and compare those results to affidavits of service filed in those cases.
The bottom line for those of us here in Washington is to realize the misconduct being reported out of NYC is NOT LIMITED to NYC. Reports such as these need to be a call to action by NAPPS, WSPSA, and every other state process server association. Our house needs cleaning and if we don't do it then someone else will. Comments (0)
Robin Mullins May 30th, 2009 07:41:45 PM