A consumer advocacy is calling on Kathleen Kraninger, the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, to resign or be fired once President-elect Joe Biden takes office, saying that the regulator has, among other claims, helped debt collectors “abuse and harass” “beleaguered” borrowers.
The group, Americans for Financial Reform, laid out a number of arguments that it claims are proof that the CFPB is “rolling back protections, and opening new avenues for abuse.”
Among the areas spotlighted in the group’s report are some of the provisions of the CFPB’s Debt Collection Rule. By not limiting the number of text messages and emails that collectors can send to individuals when attempting to collect on a debt, and allowing up to seven phone contact attempts per week, while also making it easier to collect debt when the statute of limitations has expired, the CFPB is making “the already serious problems of abuse and harassment by debt collectors even worse.”
The report also discusses the CFPB’s “industry friendly” response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the changes that have been made to the payday lending rule, not protecting servicemembers, neglecting student loan borrowers, and a decline in the number of enforcement actions as “devastating” evidence of the failures to “uphold and advance” the mission of the CFPB.
What the report does not say is that the number of enforcement actions in the third quarter was more than the number from the previous three quarters combined. The report also mentions a previously announced reorganization of the CFPB’s supervision and enforcement departments, but that was postponed after agency employees voiced concerns about the proposal.
