2026 Pub. 16 Issue 3

Let’s set the scene: A fraudster walks into a dealership. They’ve got a convincing fake ID, a manufactured credit history and a stolen Social Security number. They’ve rehearsed their story. They know what they’re doing.

There are certain assumptions in automotive retail that become so accepted, nobody stops to question them. One of the most expensive is this: “If we use a particular DMS, we should probably use their payment solution too.” Not because someone evaluated every option. Not because it was strategically selected. Not because it was proven to be the best fit for the dealership. Because it was there. And that’s an important distinction. Because convenience and strategy are not the same thing.

Most people assume the costliest mistakes in dealership and vehicle processing operations come from mispricing vehicles or trade-ins, but often, the biggest losses stem from inefficiency. Vehicle title processing delays, for instance, create hidden costs that ripple across operations, from paperwork piles and manual errors to compliance concerns. These bottlenecks have slowed down title and registration workflows for decades, delaying customer satisfaction and tying up capital in idle inventory.

The franchised new-vehicle dealership occupies one of the most heavily regulated spaces in American retail. In evaluating the legal and regulatory landscape over the last decade, a consistent conclusion is obvious: a dealer who thinks of the business as “just retail” rather than as a highly regulated entity will systematically underestimate the dealership’s legal exposure.