On Oct. 8, S.737A was signed into New York law, “requiring debt collectors to inform debtors that written communications are available in large print format.” The legislation becomes effective Nov. 7, 2021.
Posts published in “Compliance Management”
The District of Columbia recently passed legislation to substantially revise its debt collection law on an emergency basis. The amended law became effective Sept. 23, 2021. DC’s debt collection law was first enacted in 1971 and the amendments not only make it more burdensome for debt collectors but also for most financial services companies and other businesses operating in the District who were not previously within the scope of the law.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced on July 30, 2021, that it will be withdrawing its earlier proposal to extend the Regulation F effective date by 60 days. Thus, the original effective date of Nov. 30, 2021, will remain.
On July 6, Colorado Gov. Jared Polis signed into law Senate Bill 21-190, the Colorado Privacy Act. This makes Colorado the third state, behind California and Virginia, to enact comprehensive consumer data privacy legislation. The act becomes effective July 1, 2023.
On April 21, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit issued a decision holding that the transmittal of consumer information to a letter vendor constitutes a communication with an unauthorized third party in connection with the collection of a debt in violation of 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(b).
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit recently affirmed the dismissal of a class action complaint alleging that a collection letter’s itemization of a debt as including “$0.00” in interest and fees — when the debt could not accrue interest or fees — violated the federal Fair Debt Collection Practices Act.
On April 7, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a Proposed Rule that would postpone the effective date of the Debt Collection Final Rules, Part 1 and Part 2, by 60 days, from Nov. 30, 2021, to Jan. 29, 2022.
The federal Telephone Consumer Protection Act can no longer apply to devices that do not “us[e] a random or sequential number generator,” according to an April 1 decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
On March 15, the California Office of the Attorney General announced that additional regulations relating to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) had been approved, effective immediately.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit recently vacated a trial court’s summary judgment in favor of a debt collector and ordered dismissal for lack of Article III standing.
The State of Florida, like many states, maintains a robust workers’ compensation statute geared toward insulating employees injured on the job from associated medical services. Now, lawsuits continue to be filed against debt collectors, hospitals and other medical providers alleging that under a novel interpretation of Florida’s workers’ compensation law, it is unlawful to attempt to collect medical debt arising from work-related injuries directly from consumers.
Last year, the CFPB provided some answers to the question: What is abusive conduct? For 10 years, industry waited on a policy statement regarding the framework that the CFPB would use in enforcement related to the catch-all category of “abusiveness” only to have the CFPB rescind the policy statement citing that it intended to “exercise its supervisory and enforcement authority consistent with the full scope of its statutory authority under the Dodd-Frank Act.”