The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has published an order from its former Acting Director denying a request from a petitioner to modify or set aside a Civil Investigative Demand it received but has granted in part a request from the petitioner that part of their petitions and portions of a declaration be treated confidentially.
A copy of the order in the matter of Enova International, which was issued Sept. 20, 2021 — before Rohit Chopra took over as Director — can be accessed by clicking here.
Enova received a CID from the CFPB back in May. The CID sought to determine whether short-term or small-dollar lenders debited or attempted to debit consumers’ bank accounts without first obtaining the proper consent to do so, failed to honor loan extensions that were granted to consumers, and made false or misleading representations to consumers, among other violations.
Enova filed its petition to modify or set aside the CID, arguing that the CFPB has no basis to investigate Enova’s subsidiaries, that the CID should be narrowed “to conform with a release from liability” that the CFPB provided to Enova in a Consent Order from 2019, and that the statute of limitations on some of the alleged infractions had already expired.
David Uejio, then the Acting Director of the CFPB, disagreed with each of the arguments made by the company.
The argument that the CFPB should not investigate specific subsidiaries of Enova is “fact-based” and “therefore not a valid rationale to resist enforcement of a CID,” Uejio wrote. With respect to the release from liability related to the 2019 Consent Order, the scope of the current investigation is different and “has no bearing on several different aspects of the current CID.”
Uejio also shot down the statute of limitations argument, saying that the Consumer Financial Protection Act prohibits actions no more than three years after the date of discovery of the violation. No violations have been discovered, Uejio said, so the statute of limitations clock has not yet started.
