A group of consumer advocacies have written to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeking a two-month extension for the comment period to the agency’s proposed debt collection rule, arguing the complexities of what has been proposed, the wide variety of individuals who will be impacted by the proposal, and other CFPB initiatives seeking input taking up a lot of the groups’ bandwidth necessitate an extension of the comment period.
The groups seeking the extension — Americans for Financial Reform Education Fund, Center for Responsible Lending, Consumer Federation of America, National Association of Consumer Advocates, National Consumer Law Center, Public Citizen, U.S. PIRG — submitted the request via email last week. It was subsequently posted as a comment to the proposed rule.
To date, 1,160 comments have been filed, most of them by consumers expressing their displeasure and disappointment with the proposed rule. The comment period for the proposed debt collection rule opened on May 19 and is scheduled to remain open for 90 days, until August 21, unless it is extended.
The groups would like an extension because the “proposal is very long and complicated,” covering all aspects of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and each of the areas covered by the proposal are “intricate and complicated in its own right, and many of the proposals also have potential implications for topics not directly addressed in the proposal.”
Looking at the age of the FDCPA — which the groups incorrectly pegged at 52 years instead of 42 — and the large amount of case law, rules, and enforcement actions that have been issued in lifespan of the law, assessing the impact of the proposals within larger compliance fabric requires more time, the groups contend.
The groups also pointed to their limited resources — both in terms the small number of “organizations that represent the interests of people subject to debt collection that have the expertise and capacity to analyze the complex proposal and to respond with detailed analyses in light of the current state of the law and practice and of the impacts of the proposed changes on consumers,” and the impact on consumers of all shapes and sizes from all walks of life.
It is those organizations that have largely been tasked with getting the word out because the CFPB has not done much beyond the steps it took during the week the rule was released, the groups said in their email. “… there has been little publicity encouraging comments from the public beyond the activities during the week of the proposal’s release. The task of publicizing the proposal and encouraging comments has been left to the same resource-strapped organizations that are attempting to respond to the proposed regulation.”
Finally, the groups point to a number of other initiatives being undertaken by the CFPB, including revising the payday lending rule, hosting a forum to define abusiveness under the Dodd-Frank Act, and proposing a rule under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, to name a few, as stretching their resources too thin.
“The Bureau has taken several years to get to the stage of a proposed rule because of the complexity of the issues. There is no urgency that mitigates against giving the public two more months to respond to that proposal.”
