National Motor Vehicle Title Information System

[Don]

Source: New York Sunday Times.com

September 28, 2008
MOTORING
After 16 Years of Promises, Better Background Checks for Used Cars

By CHRISTOPHER JENSEN
BY next April consumers may finally get something promised by Congress in 1992: a comprehensive database of used vehicles that were stolen or so badly damaged that they were declared total losses.

Last Monday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled in favor of three consumer groups that had sued to force the government to carry out the long-delayed consumer protection law. The law requires a listing, the National Motor Vehicle Title Information System, that insurance companies, junkyards and salvage yards must supply with the vehicle identification numbers of vehicles that have been written off.

Judge Marilyn Hall Patel rejected the Justice Department’s claim that no legal action was needed, ordering the department to have the system available to consumers by March 31, 2009.

Details of the program, including whether consumers will be charged a fee for a vehicle check, have not been worked out. It was unclear whether the government would appeal.

The suit was brought by Public Citizen of Washington, Consumers for Auto Reliability and Safety of Sacramento and Consumer Action of San Francisco in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California.

Currently, few insurance companies report this type of information to databases that consumers can check. Making that information available on the national system will help consumers by “breaking the dam of insurance secrecy about wrecked cars,” said Bernard E. Brown, a lawyer in Fairway, Kan., who specializes in automotive cases.

Services like Carfax and Experian AutoCheck, which charge a fee to check a vehicle identification number, get virtually all their information from state records. Critics say that leaves gaps.

One resource that does use insurance company data is the free VINCheck service of the National Insurance Crime Bureau, an industry association. But 25 of the 136 participating insurers do not provide information about totaled vehicles, the bureau said. Officials for several companies that are listed as not providing information said they were unaware of the omissions.

Indeed, the bureau’s Web site, nicb.org, warns that the database does not have information on every vehicle. VINCheck is still valuable to consumers, said Frank Scafidi, a spokesman, but he acknowledged that more information would be better. “If it were up to me, they would all be doing it,” he said.

Kenneth Klein, the owner of Consumers’ Auto Detective, a collision consulting service in Elgin, Ill., said he ran through the VINCheck system the identification numbers of 88 vehicles he knew were so badly wrecked that they should have salvage titles — and 28 came back with clean titles.

Mr. Scafidi acknowledged VINCheck’s weaknesses but said it covered about 75 percent of insured vehicles.

The insurance industry denied it was keeping data from the public. David F. Snyder, vice president and assistant general counsel for the American Insurance Association, said the information was for the use of insurance companies. “It wasn’t collected for purposes of public disclosure,” he said.