Debt Collection Complaints and Regulation: Last Chance to Comment on...

Today is your last chance to comment on the CFPB's Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Regulation F, regarding debt collection.  I had the pleasure of working with Pat McCoy on a joint comment to the ANPR.  Our comment addresses documentation and information requirements for collectors, chain of title issues, and debt repositories.

After reading two reports released yesterday I'm even more convinced that these are among the most critical issues.  The FTC announced their top 2013 complaints (debt collection still the top industry complained about) and US PIRG released a report on the more than 11,000 complaints the CFPB received on debt collection over a six month period.  The PIRG report in particular highlights just how important the integrity of the information and documentation passed from collector to collector is (and how badly this is working right now).  Most consumers were complaining that the debt was not theirs (25%), they were not given enough information to verify the debt (13%), or that the debt had already been paid (11%).  

This is exactly the underlying issue that we address in our ANPR comment: something is very wrong when a debt buyer only gets a spreadsheet with some information about the debt, gets no documents in connection with the debt, signs a contract where the seller doesn't stand behind the information sold (and sometimes specifically says amounts or interest may be wrong), and then attempts to collect on that debt. I've argued that this violates the FDCPA.  In our comment we try to propose some ways to fix this problem going forward.

I urge Credit Slips readers to send in your comments before the 11:59pm deadline.