Former Hertz Employee Says Company Is Outsourcing Its Collection Efforts To Law Enforcement
Rental car company Hertz has put the hurt" back in, um, Hertz." The company recently declared itself bankrupt, something that presumably only referred to its balance sheet.
But Hertz has more problems. In 2021 (the same year Hertz emerged" from bankruptcy), the company was sued by a man who could have been cleared of murder charges if only the company has been interested in finding his rental receipt. It took the company three years to produce the records clearing Herbert Alford, but that came at the tail end of Alford's five years behind bars.
More recently, the company has been sued for falsely reporting rental vehicle thefts - something that has led to false charges, wrongful imprisonment, and a class action lawsuit. Hertz's best practices when it comes to suspected theft are apparently the worst. Hundreds of plaintiffs claim Hertz doesn't do much in terms of verification, apparently preferring law enforcement handle its due diligence for it. Unfortunately, turning this over to law enforcement means people lose their freedoms. And, if the practice continues, people are going to lose their lives.
Bogus stolen vehicle reports lead to guns out traffic stops by law enforcement. Once the guns are out, it's up to the driver to ensure they don't get shot. That's not always going to work out and Hertz is lucky it's not fielding wrongful death suits. But that luck isn't going to hold forever. Sooner or later, the utterly imaginable will happen and Hertz will be somewhat responsible for the dead body lying near an officer who mistook confusion for resistance.
Hertz claims in court this inability to properly research alleged thefts only affects a very small percentage of its customers. But that still means 3,500-8,000 customers are wrongly accused of theft every year. Thousands of false reports are resulting in dozens of cases where people have lost their jobs, their freedom (at least temporarily), and their ability to live a normal life despite never having stolen a car from Hertz.
It gets worse. A former Hertz employee handed a scoop to cable news network News Nation, informing journalists there that the company has decided the public should foot the bill for its collection/repo efforts.
Daniel Stokes worked for Hertz for 11 years from 1996 till 2007 and was a branch and city manager in charge of 24 different Hertz locations.
Being a city manager and knowing what the processes were and learning more about what actually happens to the people, quite honestly, it pissed me off that knowing that it was still going on," Stokes told NewsNation investigative reporter Rich McHugh.
Stokes believes the way Hertz is managing this current process is wrong.
I don't see how it's legal," Stokes said.
He says Hertz should not be involving police in most of these cases, but a collections company, instead.
In cases where customers have rented a car and not returned it on the due date, Hertz is actually using the police department as a repo company and the court system as a collection company," Stokes said. All of these supposed embezzlement by thefts are collection issues. They're not actual thefts."
As a private company, Hertz is free to pursue alleged theft however it wants to. But that freedom to pursue ends where its bottom line meets the public dollar. A private company should not be using law enforcement as its proxy collection effort, especially when Hertz is often wrong about its theft allegations. This offloads the cost and potentially deadly outcomes to non-customers, who are forced to not only pay for enforcement efforts triggered by Hertz's theft reports, but officers who may be sued for actions they've taken in response to possibly bogus reports.
According to the whistleblower, Hertz's rental system lags behind its theft-reporting system. Even if a car has been returned after it was due and all additional charges paid, the car is handed over to a new renter prior to the car being cleared. That leads to more false theft reports, this time targeting a new renter who has returned a vehicle late or otherwise raised flags in the rental system.
Hertz has yet to respond to these allegations. That's unsurprising, considering it's currently being sued for doing exactly the sort of thing alleged by the whistleblower. To be clear, there has been no independent verification of the claims made by the former Hertz employee - one who was also allegedly falsely accused of theft and embezzlement by his employer over his use of a company-owned car while he was on medical leave.
If anything lends credence to this whistleblower's claims, it's the fact that no other car rental company is facing similar allegations. This indicates something is severely broken in Hertz's rental system - one that allows rental agents to not only act on limited info, but to compel law enforcement to act on reports that appear to be lacking in actionable evidence.
Deliberately or inadvertently, Hertz has managed to leverage human nature to create a cottage industry of false accusations and bogus arrests. Hertz employees naturally want to limit theft of vehicles. And law enforcement officers are always looking for a good bust - one that rises about the normal street hassle that tends to define their day-to-day work. When it all comes together, innocent people who owe Hertz nothing and who haven't actually broken any laws are becoming victims of a justice system that moves fastest when it's working with nothing more than allegations and much more slowly when it comes to clearing people who are supposed to be presumed innocent.
As was noted above, Hertz is still involved in a lawsuit over its sketchy theft reporting practices. It has been ordered to turn over information about its theft reports to the court. Discovery continues. Whether or not there's anything to the whistleblower's allegations may soon become public record. But until then, we should remain skeptical of these claims, but not so skeptical we refuse to acknowledge the uncomfortable fact that no other rental car company in the nation is facing similar allegations from hundreds of renters.