On 3/22/21, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced the release of its annual report to Congress on the administration of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. According to the CFPB’s release, the report highlights efforts by the CFPB and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to protect consumers, particularly those who have suffered profound financial impacts due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The CFPB explained that they, along with the FTC and state and federal partners, accomplished much toward stopping unlawful debt collection practices and continuing their vigorous law enforcement, consumer education and public outreach, and policy initiatives.
The release explains that the CFPB and the FTC continue to share authority to enforce the FDCPA, and work closely to coordinate efforts to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, and abusive debt collection practices. The two agencies reauthorized a permanent memorandum of understanding on February 2019 that facilitates consultation in rulemaking, enables coordination in enforcement, sharing of supervisory information and consumer complaints, and collaboration on consumer education.
The release also provides a number of accomplishments from CFPB and FTC activities. For example, the CFPB explained in the release that it resolved two of the four public enforcement actions it engaged in during 2020 which came from alleged FDCPA violations. In addition, the report provides other CFPB accomplishments, such as:
Identified several issues that raise the risk of consumer harm during the COVID-19 pandemic through its supervisory Prioritized Assessments;
Published content to help consumers financially navigate the COVID-19 pandemic, including on debt collection, that has been accessed by users approximately 4.3 million times;
Provided consumer debt collection educational materials – In 2020, “Ask CFPB,” an interactive online consumer education tool logged 1.9 million pageviews and/or downloads in English and 220,000 in Spanish for its debt collection questions;
Released a report highlighting servicemembers’ complaint data from 2019;
Published information about debt collection activity during the pandemic for student loans; and,
Published results of a quantitative online survey of over 8,000 respondents to test several versions of disclosures to support the understanding of time-barred debt and revival that informed the CFPB’s final rules on debt collection.
The 2021 Annual Report can be found here.