Senate advances bill to protect SC injury victims. How does it address our investigation?
South Carolina legislators appear to prioritize protecting vulnerable residents’ financial futures in light of a McClatchy investigation.
The investigative series, Cashed Out, detailed how JG Wentworth and other companies have for years been purchasing accident victims’ future structured settlements for immediate lump sums, often for pennies on the dollar.
The state’s law regulating these transactions has sat untouched since it was implemented in 2002 despite several other states adding additional protections in recent years. But South Carolina is now on the path to joining those states.
A bill to comprehensively reform the state’s Structured Settlement Protection Act passed its first hurdle Wednesday after members of a Senate Judiciary subcommittee unanimously moved it forward during their first meeting of the 2023 session.
The legislation will next need approval by the full Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Luke Rankin, the bill’s primary sponsor.
The Horry County Republican credited McClatchy’s reporting during Wednesday’s hearing for exposing how South Carolina has “effectively become the playground” for the companies, known as structured settlement factoring companies, that purchase accident victims’ future payments.
“This effort is multi-faceted, reaches across every touch point, to try to reign this in and protect our most vulnerable,” Rankin said of the bill.
The legislation, which is co-sponsored by Sens. Tom Young, R-Aiken, and Brad Hutto, D-Orangeburg, would: require factoring companies to register with the S.C. Secretary of State’s Office to do business here; require the companies to file these deals in courts in the county where the seller lives; require disclosure to judges of a seller’s previous sales; and allow judges to appoint an independent attorney advisor to investigate to determine whether the proposal is in the seller’s best interest.
The appointment of an attorney advisor would be required in cases involving sellers who are minors or those with known mental or cognitive impairments. That provision currently only exists in Minnesota, which changed its law after the Star Tribune newspaper published its investigative series, Unsettled, which inspired McClatchy’s investigation in South Carolina.
Attorney Sue Berkowitz, director of the South Carolina Appleseed Legal Justice Center, spoke at the hearing in favor of the bill. She represents a woman featured in McClatchy’s series who received her structured settlement after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a train crash before selling 30 years worth of those future payments in 17 separate deals.
She told McClatchy after the hearing she was glad the subcommittee members all supported the bill, but she worried that the factoring companies would soon begin lobbying legislators to weaken or kill the proposal.
