Aggravation Taxes

Some MMM readers know that I don't make my living as a blogger. It would be nice, maybe someday.

For the meantime I am a small business owner in New Jersey. My principle business is leasing commercial vehicles to other small businesses. I am also a used vehicle dealer which allows me to sell my vehicles at retail when the leases are over and the vehicles returned.

In this economy many businesses are struggling to make their payments on time and unfortunately I find myself repossessing and reselling or releasing quite a few vehicles.

A few months ago I repossessed a school bus from a small operator in Essex County.

After getting the bus back and spending a couple of thousand dollars repairing and reconditioning it I was fortunate to lease it a larger and more stable school bus operator and recover most of my investment.

As it turns out, I was not the only one the first customer wasn't paying. School buses are inspected every six months and MVC collects a fee for each inspection. This operator wrote a bad check for his last inspection on the bus I leased to him.

MVC wouldn't let me register the bus to the new customer because of the bounced check. They said I had to pay for the bounced check and a fee to restore registration privileges of the customer who bounced the check.

After a couple of weeks talking to various supervisors at MVC in Trenton each of agreed with me that this was inequitable. Someone else bounced a check to an agency of the state and I am being forced to pay his check and fines in order to use my property legally. By my paying the check and fines the other guy is now off the hook and free to operate vehicles again.

"Well you could sue him for the money," one supervisor told me. "You're the State of New Jersey, have him arrested, " I replied, "Do you have any idea how much it would cost me to sue him for the $240 you are holding me up for?"

Next time I'll just pay the fees rather than spend the time appealing it. I wasted too much time over $240 this time.