RMV hit by suits from both lenders who say it's letting tow companies sell towed cars too fast and tow companies who say it's made it impossible to sell cars police told them to tow

Tow companies last month sued the Registry of Motor Vehicles for slowing down and even stopping the processing of documentation they need to sell off cars they say they towed at the request of local police but which are now just taking up space in their garages because the cars' owners are not coming forward to reclaim them.

Damn right, the Registry, represented by the office of Attorney General Andrea Campbell, says in response to the Plymouth Superior Court suit: Many of the applications for the required title transfers are in fact "fraudulent and unlawful" and the agency is not going to put up with the nonsense anymore - with such nonsense allegedly including dragging things out to drive up storage fees for those owners who do want their cars back and tow companies that rejected from getting the ability to sell off cars at one Registry branch simply resubmitting the same exact applications at another branch.

That lawsuit, by the Statewide Towing Association and four tow companies, comes even as banks and the finance arms of car makers say, no, the RMV is making it too easy for tow companies sell off cars they shouldn't, in suits alleging they are being deprived of their 14th Amendment right to due process because the cars on which they still have liens are being sold off without alerting them first after the cars have been towed on order of police.

Honda won a federal lawsuit against Revere over the practice in 2020 on constitutional grounds. The company is currently suing a Boston tow company in a similar case.

Earlier this year, Santander sued Boston, a tow company and the RMV in federal court on similar grounds, and then about a month later, Volkswagen sued Revere, also in federal court.

In the Plymouth County case, the tow operators allege that the RMV changed its reporting requirements in March for approving paperwork to let companies sell off towed cars sitting in their garages - by demanding way more proof the operators had a legitimate right to sell the vehicles. This included providing "all original documents" instead of copies and detailed documents related to authorization by whatever police department had ordered the car towed and proof that newspaper ads announcing the impending sale of impounded vehicles not just in Massachusetts, but whatever state out-of-state cars were from.

And, the association says, the Registry added a new requirement to document all tows, including the name of the specific local officer who authorized the towing of individual cars. That requirement alone is almost impossible to meet, the association alleges:

In practice, tow companies are not given the name, badge number or any other identifying information relative to the "Authorizing Officer's Name" and some police agencies use third party dispatch companies comprised of non-officers, thereby making this requirement difficult, if not impossible, for towing companies to comply with.

Also, the state lien enforcement statue does not require that information, the association alleges.

Equally impossible to comply with: A new requirement that the registered owner of a towed vehicle be notified within seven days of his car being towed, because to start, the law does not require that and also, tow operators may not get that information within seven days of a tow, the association says.

STA says it complained to the RMV, which began a series of meetings that, however, the association says led nowhere and so now companies are looking at garages filling up with cars that nobody's claiming and that is leaving the companies to have to "store vehicles subject to involuntary tows in perpetuity without being able to legally dispose of them."

In response to the group's motion for a temporary injunction to force it to start approving license transfers again, the RMV says it had little choice but to crack down after a review of 200 random license-transfer requests from tow companies showed only 15% had paperwork complying with the law.

The Registry's answer says that 71 of the applications had owner notifications returned as undeliverable, 101 had no proof the cars were actually towed, copies of the required newspaper legal ads were often unreadable, the right police chiefs were not notified of the impending sales and that in some cases, the proof of a reason to tow the vehicle was "a private Court Order Tow, not a Police Tow" - significant because court-ordered tows require going to court to get an order to sell off the car, which can be a time-consuming process, while police tows do not.

The RMV argues the new requirements are hardly onerous and would not have even been needed had the tow companies actually complied with the law in the past, instead of playing games:

In addition, the Registry also became aware that once a Registry location's employees rejected applications from certain tow companies as non-compliant, the tow companies would not correct the applications but resubmit them to a new Registry location in an apparent attempt to circumvent the rejection.

Collectively, these practices allowed tow companies to store vehicles for unreasonably long periods of time, running up storage fees for owners/consumers to exorbitant levels, and to avoid court scrutiny of sales and title transfers.

By way of example of these practices, on May 23, 2022, Chrisopher's [one of the four companies that sued the Registry] towed a 2013 Ford Fiesta with 112,667 miles on the odometer. It then stored the vehicle for 296 days for a total storage fee of $10,360. On April 10, 2023, it sold the vehicle for $2,500. If Christopher's had accessed the Registry's online database of owners' names on the same date as the tow, and given the owner timely notice of the tow from that date, the owner could have paid a fraction of the $10,360 storage fee and recovered their vehicle prior to its sale.

Complete complaint (2.1M PDF).
Complete complaint (2.1M PDF).