Complaint Review: Union Acceptance Corp.

I am a former employee of UAC. I was employed in their risk management division from 1998 - 1999. I was laid off along with many other employees in January of 1999 due to "Cash Management" problems, which is another way of saying that becasue they couldnt manage their finances and people were skimming the budgets, a lot of innocent people lost their jobs.

I have observed a number of things while working for UAC that should be made public knowledge.

1. They prey on consumers that are under-educated about credit and finances and frequently over-finance loans.

I cant tell you how many loans I saw that were grosely over-financed and the customers could not pay their loans. An example would be lets, say a used Geo-Metro with a monthly payment of over $350 / $400 on a 60 - 66 month loan!!! Do the math. You will end up paying between $22050 - $25200. for a car that costs under 10K. I used to have to reposess units from deals like this every month.

The customer would end up stuck in a loan with a peice of crap car that didnt run and paying out the nose. The consumer would end up with ever more damaged credit and UAC would repr the car and either auction it or re-sell it. UAC would benifit regardless of whether a person paid the loan off or not.

UAC isnt the only company that does this and this practice is currently legal. All I am saying is that they are a wolf in sheeps clothing and to be very cautious when doing business with them. Read the fine print and if your credit is good enough AVOID them all together.

2. Mis-management and un-professional business practices.

2a. While employed with them for one year, I had four different bosses. There was always dis-organization and every manager talked about the other managers behind their back (without exception).

2b. They regularly hire the family members of existing employees. While many companies do this, at UAC there are few protections for discrimination and favoratism. I had another associate that worked on the same level as I, and his chain smoking, un-professional, bad-mouth brother was our boss. I witnessed many occassions of unfair treatment in the work place. You would never know whom you could trust there, any person that you spoke with was someones cousin or sibling and favoritism was a way of life.

2c.They have had constant issues of controlling costs and using resources. Here they are supposed to be assisting consumers with credit issues and they are the worst offenders of them all. They have hid behind Chapter 11 Bankruptcy protection several times and have done it again in 2002. They LOVE CORPORATE WELLFARE!

As a trained and experienced fraud investigator with a degree in business management, I can tell you that they are waistfull with their resources, have lax budgetary controls, and all of the corp. rules established to maintain controls are regulary broken becasue of popularity and favoritism.

2d.They have mis-managed their resources so poorly that (1) their stock price has remained relatively the same for over 10 years. (2) the only time that you can make any money on their stock is to have insider knowledge and know when they are going to conduct massive layoffs or file for BK protection. (3) Their internal controls are a joke! If an independant well qualified fraud examination team went in there and reviewed all of the records, I would bet you that some of the their top people would be in court and possibly jail. -

This is my opinion, but as a professional fraud investigator, it always seemed strange to me that they would start new ventures that were statistically faited to make money and the next thing you know, they are claiming that they are loosing money - this is a common scam used by companies that are skimming profits and mis-reporting earnings / assets to the IRS. (4) From the inside it appears that they use the law to its fullest extent to protect themselves while they act in a non-responsible fashion towards their employee and customers.

Do business and/or invest with whom ever you choose, but be careful with this company. There is more than meets the eye. There are some very un-sustainable busines practices. I would also caution anyone to consider your employment options carefully if you are offered a job by these people. Look out! UAC only cares about UAC and how much it can expliot from its employees and customers.

Peter
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
U.S.A.

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