CFPB to Lay Off TCPA, Focus on Fair Play

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau released its Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in November, it did not indicate that it had plans to create any new rules to fix issues with the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. But at the kickoff insideCompliance webinar, Translating TCPA for Debt Collectors, expert attorneys said that the CFPB isn’t ignoring emerging industry technology like cell phones; rather, it wants to level the playing field and minimize human error.

The CFPB has made the point that if collectors are using old phone to manually dial consumers, then that method may lead to more mistakes and wrong numbers than just using a dialer in the first place. That puts collectors at risk for TCPA and FDCPA lawsuits, and the Bureau has indicated that it wants to prevent that.

“In my direct communications and meetings with CFPB personnel, they understand the issue with the TCPA,” said David Kaminski, partner at Carlson and Messer LLP. “They realize that companies, businesses, the debt collection industry has to use automated telephone technology in order to contact people. You can’t contact people in the volume that you need to with the old PBX phone, just by dialing ten digits.”

Learn more about the evolving nature of TCPA compliance – your business and bottom line depend on it! – with our new report, Compliance Focus: TCPA. We compiled the answers to pressing questions from our insideCompliance webinar series into this user-friendly report. David Kaminsky or Carlson and Messer LLP and John Rossman of Moss and Barnett, provide their most up-to-date advice, thinking and debate on TCPA compliance.

You’ll Learn:

• Does the TCPA pertain to first-party collection when it comes to cell phone communication?
• Does call forwarding create a TCPA claim, specifically when someone forwards a residential line call to a cell phone?
• If a patient provides a cell phone number during patient registration to the original creditor, does that constitute consent? Can the patient then be contacted via ATDS by a third party collector?
• And much more!

If you’re not taking advantage of this resource, you’re putting your agency at risk!