An industry trade association, in conjunction with two consumer advocacy groups, have filed a request for a 90-day extension to file comments related to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed debt collection rule. This marks the first time that an organization from the financial services industry has made such a request.
The request, which came from the American Financial Services Association, the National Consumer Law Center, and the Center for Responsible Lending, was published as a comment to the proposed rule.
The NCLC and the CRL were part of another comment, submitted by seven different advocacy groups earlier this month, that requested a 60-day extension of the comment period.
“From the industry side, AFSA is joining this request for an extension because the association is conducting a survey of its membership. The goal of the study is to determine what affect the proposed rule could have on AFSA members and their customers. AFSA believes that the survey results will help the CFPB develop a sufficiently broad and complete factual record necessary for policymaking. To properly engage members and to allow adequate time for the association to draft and distribute focused survey questions, to permit institutions to collect and verify the information, and to give AFSA time to synthesize and analyze the responses, the association is joining this request for an expansion of time beyond the period provided in the proposed rule,” AFSA said in the letter, which was signed by Bill Himpler, president and CEO of the association, which represents consumer finance companies.
Any extension of the comment period could create a situation where the proposed rule is retracted, given the amount of time it will take to issue a final rule, which could coincide with next year’s presidential election.
“If the Senate and the White House flip and the House of Representatives retains its majority in the 2020 election, it appears likely that in early 2021 joint resolution will be introduced seeking to disapprove the final debt collection rule,” wrote Joann Needleman of Clark Hill, in response to the original request for a 60-day extension. “If passed in Congress, any one of the current 2020 Democratic Presidential candidates will more than likely sign it. In that scenario, the final debt collection rule will be void with the CFPB having no opportunity to issue a substantially similar rule. The industry is back to square one.”
The seven groups that originally asked for the extension did so because the “proposal is very long and complicated,” covering all aspects of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act, and each of the areas covered by the proposal are “intricate and complicated in its own right, and many of the proposals also have potential implications for topics not directly addressed in the proposal.”
