Probably the single biggest problem the
mercenary trade is suffering from at the moment is the lack of oversight and
regulation. With the MRBC bankrupt, registration of commands has become little
more than an empty formality, which means that a lot of unpleasantness has
gotten through. There are plenty of commands now that are little more than
pirates, or would have been banned years ago that now operate with impunity, simply
because there's no real authority to stop them. As long as employers are
willing to pay them, then they're free to do what they want.
Unfortunately, this problem goes both
ways. As little oversight as there is of Mercenary commands, the employers are
even better off. Questionable terms, withholding payment, out and lying to the Mercenaries
they hire and so much more have become ever increasingly common occurrences as
those employers know there's very little authority to hold them to account. An aggrieved
mercenary command has little recourse for trying to deal with such breaches
beyond word of mouth recounting of what happened. And even then, with the
current state of the Inner Sphere's economy, there are plenty of commands
willing to take a risk in order to simply survive.
Our last contract became a very good
example of these sorts of problems in play. It's not that we didn't get paid or
that the employer tried to twist things to their advantage or abandoned us in
the field. It's that the Employer simply misrepresented themselves as to their
actual identity and motivation, taking advantage of both the collapse of the
MRBC and the inability to run thorough background checks that has come out of
it.
