F&I Spotlight F&I and Dealership Ethics The bedrock of morality in the F&I office can sometimes have cracks that seem like gray areas but, are they? By: Marv Eleazer T he words were chilling. A lone F&I manager was delivering a deal and being placed in an unusual predicament. “Help! Executive management in my store wants me to look the other way and have the co-signor ‘sign’ their name to documents and they’re not present”. Apparently, the customer lives in another town and the supervisor didn’t have the patience to either wait for the customer to arrive and sign in person or, at the very least, have the paperwork sent and then returned with genuine original signatures intact. It goes without saying that commission-driven pay plans can cause an otherwise honest employee to blur the lines and walk where angels fear to tread if personal ethics aren’t checked at the door. Even though this manager wasn’t being asked to personally forge a document, the mere insinuation of allowing a spouse to sign by proxy albeit outside in their car was just as irresponsible an act. Doing so causes the manager to be complicit as though it was done in their presence or worse, forged by the said manager. Personally, I learned this the hard way many years ago when young in my career. A customer agreed to the terms of a sale and had phoned their spouse to discuss. The absent spouse was very busy and instructed the one present to sign their name as in the example above. Stupidly and without thinking, I allowed it. The next afternoon an employee from a competing dealership across town walked into my office demanding satisfaction. This person happened to be their son and was angry they hadn’t purchased from him. After slapping the paperwork and keys on my desk, he told me his parents revealed to him what happened, and he insisted we unwind the deal because we didn’t have a legal contract. I was speechless and morosely embarrassed. I never even entertained the idea again as it taught me a valuable lesson in conscious ethics. Label me naïve, but I believe most people want to do the right thing where a car deal is concerned. I do not think car folk get up every day with a dark scheme in mind to defraud nor step across the legal fence in pursuit of a commission check. Rather, it’s my conviction they’d love for every deal to be as clean as possible. However, it can be tempting to take the easy route of breaking the rules in favor of swiftly delivering a car when things start going south. Coupled with a lack of training and firm leadership, even a well meaning staffer can justify doing things the wrong way. But we all know quality error-free work can often take more time especially sub-prime deals. And assertive customers don’t always have the needed patience. They can quickly dial up the pressure to the point of threatening to go elsewhere which in turn, causes management to panic. And the dealer down the street will most likely not care about doing things being done the right way, so the heat is always on. You just have to remember to slow down and make sure everything is done according to the book. That old adage “A stitch in time, saves nine” shouldn’t be lost when considering car deal ethics. Do it right the first time so you don’t have to do it again because we all know how expensive that can be. Most of us have faced questionable situations like the one above and redirected things to avoid impropriety but there always seems to be another twist in the making. In this issue, I’d like to address various questionable borderline ethics practices sometimes observed by dealership management. These are just a few and I’m certain you’ve seen others. 5
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