The exemptions, required for consideration under the TRACED Act, may cover informational and debt collection calls.
10/27/2020 14:00
ACA International responded to the Federal Communications Commission’s Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to review Telephone Consumer Protection Act exemptions required by the Telephone Robocall Abuse Criminal Enforcement and Deterrence (TRACED) Act this week with a request for the FCC to not remove or narrow the exemptions, which may cover debt collection calls.
Section eight of the TRACED Act requires the FCC to periodically review any exemptions granted under the TCPA and update them as needed.
The scope of this NPRM will have industry-wide significance for callers in the accounts receivable management (ARM) industry, ACA previously reported.
“ACA supports the commission’s efforts to protect consumers against illegal robocalls while also ensuring that consumers continue to receive the time-sensitive non-marketing communications that they want and need,” Leah Dempsey, ACA’s vice president and senior counsel of federal advocacy said in the comments to the FCC. “The longstanding exemption from the Telephone Consumer Protection Act for calls ‘made for a commercial purpose but [that] do[] not include or introduce an advertisement or constitute telemarketing’ 2 (i.e., non-marketing commercial calls) continues to serve the public interest and remains highly beneficial for consumers. Therefore, the commission should not remove or narrow the exemption, including by arbitrarily limiting the number of times a business can contact its customer for non-marketing or informational purposes, imposing a new opt-out process, or adopting additional recordkeeping requirements.”
The NPRM includes proposed measures to implement section eight of the TRACED Act. Specifically, as directed by the TRACED Act, the FCC seeks to ensure that any exemption adopted includes requirements with respect to the classes of parties that may make such calls; the classes of parties that may be called; and the number of such calls that may be made to a particular called party, according to the NPRM.
Of the various exemptions under review, the FCC will reconsider exemptions allowing prerecorded calls to residential landlines that are “not made for a commercial purpose,” and prerecorded calls to residential landlines that are “made for a commercial purpose,” but do not “include or introduce an advertisement or constitute telemarketing.” (Emphasis added.)
The FCC sought comment on whether to amend the exemptions previously determined to comply with the TRACED Act. These exemptions include non-commercial calls to a residence; commercial calls to a residence that do not constitute telemarketing; tax-exempt nonprofit organization calls to a residence; HIPAA-related calls to a residence; package delivery-related calls to a wireless number; financial-institution calls to a wireless number; health care-related calls to a wireless number; inmate calling service calls to a wireless number; and cellular carrier calls to their own subscribers.
“Such changes would ultimately not benefit consumers that need to receive non- marketing calls and are unnecessary given existing incentives on businesses to limit the number of non-marketing calls that they place,” Dempsey said in the comments.
Read ACA’s complete comments here.
Reply comments are due Nov. 3. ACA International will be filing comments on the NPRM.