The report covers debt collection industry activity and enforcement actions as well as prioritized assessments for regulated entities.
3/23/2021 14:00
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued its annual report on administration of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act—including the Regulation F (Reg F) debt collection rule—and an overview of the debt collection industry to Congress this week.
The CFPB report, released under the leadership of Acting Director David Uejio, follows a similar report from the Federal Trade Commission issued last week. Both reports highlight efforts by the agencies to protect consumers, particularly those who have suffered profound financial impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CFPB and FTC reports also cover enforcement of unlawful debt collection practices. The CFPB highlighted content to help consumers with financial resources during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The CFPB and the FTC share authority to enforce the FDCPA and continue to work closely to coordinate efforts to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive debt collection practices. The two agencies reauthorized a permanent memorandum of understanding in February 2019 that facilitates consultation in rulemaking, enables coordination in enforcement, sharing of supervisory information and consumer complaints, and collaboration on consumer education.
In 2020, the CFPB engaged in four public enforcement actions arising from alleged FDCPA violations, according to a news release on the report. The CFPB resolved two of these cases. The two judgments ordered nearly $15.2 million in consumer redress and $80,000 in civil money penalties. Two cases remain in active litigation.
According to the news release on the report, in 2020 the CFPB:
- Identified several issues that raise the risk of consumer harm during the COVID-19 pandemic through its supervisory prioritized assessments;
- Published content to help consumers financially navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, including on debt collection, that has been accessed by users approximately 4.3 million times;
- Provided consumer debt collection educational materials. In 2020, the “Ask CFPB” interactive online consumer education tool logged 1.9 million pageviews and/or downloads in English and 220,000 in Spanish for its debt collection questions;
- Released a report highlighting service members’ complaint data from 2019;
- Published information about debt collection activity during the pandemic for student loans; and,
- Published results of a quantitative online survey of over 8,000 respondents to test several versions of disclosures to support the understanding of time-barred debt and revival that informed the CFPB’s final rules on debt collection.
The report also covers the bureau’s supervisory highlights detailing prioritized assessments for mortgage servicing, auto and student loan servicing, credit card account management, consumer reporting-furnishing, debt collection, deposits, prepaid cards and small business lending.
The report reflects information gathered from supervised entities from May through September 2020, including how the institution was assisting consumers, challenges the institution was facing as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and changes the institution made to its compliance management system (CMS) in response to the pandemic, ACA International previously reported.
Of note, the assessments are not designed to identify violations of federal consumer financial law, but rather to find and assess risks and communicate these risks to supervised entities so that they can be addressed to prevent consumer harm.