It's possible there's price fixing, but I think it would be very difficult to prove without hard evidence. They don't have to discuss numbers to come up with similar results. An offhand comment about paying notaries less might be all it would take for someone else to look into doing the same thing and establishing price fixing would take much more than that. Besides, many of them pay way too low - but not exactly the same, from what I've heard. (Those are companies that I no longer accept work from, so I don't have first hand knowledge.)
Another contributing factor could be that lots of companies figured out for themselves that some notaries quote ss fees even when working direct. I'm sure they like keeping the difference and it's not too big a leap to calculate how much more they'd make if they forced all of their notaries to do the same. |