The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said Friday it will stop publishing consumer complaint narratives and related data visualizations in its public Consumer Complaint Database, reversing a transparency policy in place since 2015.
The bureau said publication of the narratives is discretionary under the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires the CFPB to maintain a complaint database but does not mandate that the written accounts be made public. The agency characterized the narratives as unverified, one-sided, and often unrelated to actual violations of law.
“Publishing such narratives in the Database provides a less-than-representative sample of one-sided experiences that cannot provide consumers with a balanced and accurate view of companies’ compliance with their legal obligations,” the CFPB said in its announcement. The bureau added that publication “needlessly harms companies’ reputations.”
Previously published narratives will be treated as public domain for Freedom of Information Act purposes and moved to the CFPB’s FOIA Reading Room, a practice the bureau said mirrors the Federal Trade Commission. The CFPB said it will continue to collect, monitor, and respond to complaints, assess how completely and quickly companies respond, and share complaint data with prudential regulators, the FTC, and other federal and state agencies.
The move follows a June 24 announcement in which the bureau said it was standardizing how credit reporting agencies handle complaints, strengthening identity protections, and focusing resources on complaints warranting substantive responses. The CFPB has cited strain from rapid growth in submissions and complaints generated by credit-repair organizations, social-media influencers, and artificial intelligence.
Complaint volume has climbed sharply, roughly doubling each year, from 1.6 million in 2023 to 3.2 million in 2024 and 6.6 million in 2025, according to the bureau. Most of the increase involves credit reporting. The Consumer Data Industry Association, the credit bureaus’ trade group, has pressed the CFPB to reduce complaints, citing difficulty meeting the 30-day response requirement, American Banker reported. Under then-acting director Russell Vought, the bureau purged its complaint backlog two months ago.
Consumer advocates condemned the decision. Erie Meyer, a former CFPB chief technologist who helped build the database, said burying the information makes corporate misconduct harder to see. Sen. Elizabeth Warren [D-Mass.], ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, said the administration is “burying the evidence of corporate abuses against American consumers.”
The database has published narratives, submitted with consumer consent and stripped of personal information, since mid-2015. The CFPB has logged more than 17 million complaints to date.
