Well, the one thing that can be said for CfC is that it is coming along precisely how you would expect a program to come along where the government inserts itself between the seller and the buyer. These sort of things are nothing if not predictable.
The plan's popularity, plus confusion among dealers over its rules, has contributed to administrative gridlock. The Department of Transportation, which runs the program through its National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, indicated to auto dealers Thursday that it would add staff to address the backlog of unpaid applications for clunker vouchers.
Dealers say the government is putting them in financial peril. The law requires dealers to deliver a new vehicle to qualifying customers, even if the government payment hasn't yet arrived. The government says it will reimburse dealers within 10 days of the applications' approval.
But dealers say payments have been slow to arrive. "We've got 155 clunkers on the ground and no money in the bank," says Earl Stewart, owner of the Earl Stewart Toyota dealership in North Palm Beach, Fla. "We're selling ourselves into a very negative cash-flow situation."
And when the federal government has only reimbursed auto dealers for 2 percent of the claims they’ve submitted, one can see why they are a bit skittish right now and kinda makes you wonder where the first $1 billion dollars went now that we have anted-up for $2 billion more.
According to the Transportation Department there are 225 people reviewing claims and to date their have been 338,659 vehicles sold under CfC for a case load of 1,500 per reviewer so, yeah, this thing might require some staffing up.
So, beyond the absolute lunacy of the CfC effectively being its own “death panel” for perfectly functioning automotive assets, the administrative goat rope that CfC has become is everything you could imagine it to be.
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