The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on Friday released its annual report on its administration of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, summarizing its enforcement activities, complaints filed by consumers, its proposed debt collection rule, and what it has done to educate consumers about debt collection.
The report also include information from the Federal Trade Commission, which shares enforcement responsibility for the FDCPA under a Memorandum of Understanding.
Along with providing general demographic and economic data about consumer debt and the debt collection industry, and breaking down complaints filed by consumers with the CFPB, the CFPB re-committed itself to issuing a final debt collection rule this year.
In the report, the CFPB highlighted that it obtained $50 million in judgments earmarked to be refunded to consumers and $11.2 million in fines that were paid to the Bureau. The FTC obtained $25 million in judgments in 2019. The report the CFPB issued last year said that $800,000 in fines was assessed while the FTC obtained $59 million in judgments.
The 75,200 complaints received by the Bureau in 2019 were down from the 81,500 that it received in 2018, according to the two reports.
CFPB Director Kathleen Kraninger was slightly less verbose this year in her introductory remarks. One potentially interesting change was in her initial paragraph. In last year’s introduction, she said:
In 1977, Congress passed the FDCPA “to eliminate abusive debt collection practices by debt collectors.”
This year, a new clause was added and it reads,
In 1977, Congress passed the FDCPA “to eliminate abusive debt collection practices by debt collectors” while ensuring that “those debt collectors who refrain from using abusive debt collection practices are not competitively disadvantaged.”
Is there anything to be read by adding the additional language from the FDCPA in this year’s remarks, at a time when the Bureau is actively engaged in finalizing a proposed rule for the collection industry?
