There's all kinds of nonsense going on in the federal government right now because that's the way the folks at Camp Runamuck want things to be. The agencies that haven't been gutted or deliberately understaffed are working in Bizarro World where they are doing the exact opposite of what they were designed to do. First among these is the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, Senator Professor Warren's brainchild that was designed to claw back the ill-gotten gains of big banks and credit-card companies. That agency, of course, has been repurposed to swindle the people it was designed to help.

And Dave Dayen reports at The Intercept on how it threw the pamphlet at a particularly noxious specimen.



This is not the first time during the Trump administration that CFPB has taken an inability to pay into account to reduce a fine for violations of consumer protection law. Under the previous acting director, current acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, this type of reduction was so widespread that it came to be known as the “Mulvaney discount.” The American justice system rarely treats impoverished defendants with such mercy.

Mulvaney has since been replaced by a confirmed director, his former aide Kathy Kraninger. The discount, however, has remained. “It looks like the Trump-appointed political leadership at the CFPB is letting a person who preyed on veterans get away with a slap on the wrist,” said Will Corbett, a litigation counsel with the Center for Responsible Lending, a consumer advocacy group, in a statement.

A dollar. It's the Duke Brothers philosophy of criminal justice reform. Try it yourself next time you go to traffic court. Tell the judge you can't afford the fine for going 80 in a 40. See how well it works.



Kathy Kraninger Carolyn Kaster/AP/REX/Shutterstock

On websites he operated, Mark Corbett marketed a deal for veterans with retiree or disability pensions. He set them up with offers from the Doe companies to purchase some or all of those future pension payments in exchange for a lump sum. Veterans would then use an online portal to redirect pension payments to a bank account controlled by one of the Doe companies. If veterans only sold part of their pension, the Doe companies would reimburse a portion of the payment every month. This was virtually the only source of the Doe companies’ consumer-side business revenue. It’s also completely illegal. Under federal law assigning veterans’ pensions to a third party is prohibited. In fact, several veterans complained to Mark Corbett that the transactions were illegal; according to those veterans, he denied it.



In a consent order, CFPB lays out this deception, accusing Mark Corbett of brokering illegal contracts with misleading terms, often without even delivering the promised funds to consumers in a timely fashion. It’s unclear how much money Corbett earned from this activity over an eight-year period, but it’s a virtual certainty that it was more than $1.

And yet, that was the ultimate fine. “Having an inability to pay based on sworn financial statements provided to the Bureau on November 8, 2018, Respondent must pay a civil money penalty of $1 to the Bureau,” the order reads.

Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP/REX/Shutterstock

As Dayen reports, the final act of lunacy is that the CFPB made sure all the paperwork on the fine was in order.

In a darkly hilarious denouement, CFPB left in all the boilerplate language included with larger fines. So the consent order intones that $1 dollar must be paid within 10 days of the effective date, and thereafter distributed to the Civil Penalty Fund to compensate victims of financial crimes. Mark Corbett is prohibited from taking a fat tax deduction for paying out that 100-cent penalty, and “to preserve the deterrent effect of the civil money penalty,” he cannot use this greenback as an offset toward any future federal fines. And if Mark Corbett defaults on this four-quarter obligation, interest will accrue. The CFPB even asks for Mark Corbett’s taxpayer ID number, so that they can track him down if he fails to cough up the 10 dimes he owes. The bureau reserves the right to send Mark Corbett into collections for the dollar, and report the delinquency to credit reporting bureaus.

He also pinky-swore he'd never do it again. He'll be out of detention by next week.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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