More than three-quarters of telemarketing companies admit to not being fully compliant with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act, according to the results of a survey conducted by a compliance monitoring service, and more than half of all companies make calls after 9pm.
Only 23% of the companies that participated in the survey said they were “fully” compliant with the TCPA, while 29% said they were “somewhat” compliant, and 48% said they were either not compliant or not aware of what the TCPA is.
While telemarketing is not directly related to collections, it is these kinds of numbers and statistics that get thrown out whenever a state or federal lawmaker or regulator wants to overhaul the TCPA to make it more restrictive. For companies — like creditors and collection agencies — these are the kinds of stereotypes that need to be dismantled in order to help improve the regulatory landscape of TCPA compliance.
“The results of this survey should be a wake up call to businesses that utilize the services of telemarketing agencies,” said Greg Sparrow, Senior Vice President and General Manager at CompliancePoint, which conducted the survey. “Businesses need to understand that handing-off telemarketing services to third-party vendors does not exempt them from regulatory fines if the telemarketing agency fails to comply with federal regulation.”