Letters to Congress

The undersigned consumer protection, civil rights, and legal services groups write to express our significant concerns with the outline of proposed regulations on debt collection issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau on July 28, 2016. The proposal represents a missed opportunity to fundamentally improve protections for consumers victimized by predatory debt collection practices. Some of the proposed changes will address certain debt collector conduct that hurts consumers. For example, we support the CFPB’s proposal to: Require the transfer of information from prior attempts to...

This letter, on behalf of the National Consumer Law Center’s low-income clients, along with a coalition of national, state and local civil legal aid, civil rights, and public interest groups and advocates, calls for the need for data to ensure that the federal student loan program is a tool that helps students of color access a meaningful education and achieve greater economic mobility, rather than holding them back.

A better enforced and strengthened CRA would be a critical tool in ensuring that underserved communities across the country are provided with the credit opportunities needed to better recover from the 2008 financial crisis. While more affluent neighborhoods have bounced back or have begun to bounce back following the crisis, many low- and moderate-income neighborhoods continue to struggle eight years later with fewer mortgages and small business lending opportunities.

This letter signed by CRL along with 163 other organizations urges the CFPB to use its Congressional authority to restrict forced arbitration. Lenders and other financial services companies use forced arbitration to push consumers out of court and into a private arbitration system that they tilt to favor large financial interests. The CFPB’s empirical findings in its comprehensive and evidence-based report on the use of arbitration clauses unequivocally demonstrate that forced arbitration imposes conditions that restrict consumers’ rights and block their access to courts, giving lenders an...

This letter commends Representative Wasserman Schultz for cosponsoring the Stopping Abuse and Fraud in Electronic (SAFE) Lending Act of 2016 and urges her to withdraw support from H.R. 4018. That bill would export the problematic "Florida model" of payday lending laws to the rest of the country. Florida's payday laws are riddled with loopholes: the average borrower is saddled with nine 300%+ interest loans each year and nearly one-in-three are burdened with a dozen or more.

View a letter from North Carolina organizations to Director Richard Cordray of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau calling for a strong payday rule. North Carolina has a unique story to tell about payday lending. North Carolina was the first state to: Roll back a once legal payday industry Litigate the rent-a-bank model Force a bank to drop its bank payday loan product

This letter urges the Bureau to establish a strong rule addressing payday, car title, and similar loans. It focuses on the migration of payday and car title lenders to long-term loans that keep borrowers trapped in prolonged unaffordable debt. This migration is already well underway in the states where long-term, high-rate loans are permitted, and lenders are already aggressively seeking authorization of these loans in states where it is not. A rule that does not prevent unaffordable lending in the long-term space will only fuel the migration and will permit ongoing, and in some cases even...

This letter urges the opposition of HR 1261 or any similar bills that undermine the independence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) by subjecting it to the appropriations process. It is less than five years since the CFPB was established. Since then, it has fulfilled Congress's vision of a federal agency with "the authority and accountability to ensure that existing consumer protection laws and regulations are comprehensive, fair, and vigorously enforced." Through its rulemaking, supervision, enforcement, and consumer education and complaint system, the CFPB has made enormous...

This joint letter expresses concern that an important opportunity to help improve language access for people who are not fluent in English is being lost. Allowing mortgage applicants to choose in which language they are most comfortable in communicating addresses a major problem of lenders and servicers working with limited English proficiency populations and collecting this information through the URLA is the most comprehensive way to do so, because every mortgage borrower fills one out.

The consumer groups signing this letter oppose the Taking Account of Institutions with Low Operation Risk Act of 2015 (H.R. 2896) and amendments that will put consumers at risk from dangerous products or practices and undermine the established notice and comment process in place for financial regulations. If adopted, the TAILOR Act could allow financial institutions to justify and exploit potentially dangerous loopholes, create confusion in the marketplace and cause unnecessary delays in the adoption of important consumer protections. Prudential and consumer regulators already have broad...