The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau yesterday released its latest Supervisory Highlights report, which chronicles the issued uncovered during examinations conducted by the Bureau during the first half of 2022. The issues are used to help drive the Bureau’s decisions regarding rulemaking and enforcement actions and have been cited as a great opportunity for those regulated by the CFPB to get a glimpse into what the CFPB is seeing and how it is likely to act on those observations.
A copy of the report can be accessed by clicking here.
One of the big enforcement tentpoles for the CFPB since Rohit Chopra took over as director is repeat violators, and the report notes that “examiners continue to identify the same violations of law across multiple institutions of a certain type, even though past editions of Supervisory Highlights have publicized such violations of other institutions of that type.” So, if you’re doing something that has already been the subject of an enforcement action, watch out. The report also notes that the CFPB has created a “Repeat Offender Unit” in its Supervision Department. So look out for “CFPB: ROU” coming to Peacock next Spring. 🙂
For companies in the debt collection space, the report focuses on credit reporting issues, such as not correcting or updating information, not providing notice of delinquency of accounts or dates of first delinquency, not establishing or implementing reasonable policies and procedures concerning the accuracy and integrity of furnished information, and not conducting reasonable investigations when a dispute has been filed.
Examiners also identified instances where collectors continued to engage with consumers in telephone conversations after the consumers state the communication was causing them to feel annoyed, harassed, or abused. In one case, a collector continued to engage after being told repeatedly that the consumer was driving and needed to discuss the account at another time.
Debt collectors were also found to have communicated with a person other than the consumer about the consumer’s debt, when the person had a name similar or identical to the consumer.
