Rohit Chopra, President Joseph Biden’s CFPB director nominee, said at his March 10 confirmation hearing that the bureau would “need to look at where we see consumer complaints to conduct trend analysis” as part of the way it will determine its enforcement and investigative priorities. “Complaints are always one of the biggest factors in targeting for enforcement investigations,” Morris, now a partner at Hudson Cook LLP, said. The CFPB isn’t the only federal regulator to compile a consumer-complaint database, but it is the only one to make the information public. Even if you thought you were going to have a more forgiving agency, now you don’t,” said Lucy Morris, a former CFPB deputy enforcement director. “You have a change in administration and everything’s different.

The jump in complaints for 2020 gives the CFPB’s enforcement staff a bundle of leads to follow, particularly with new leadership promising more aggressive enforcement than the leniency on complying with pandemic-related regulatory changes the Trump administration gave to companies.

But those complaints, verified or not, often provide a guide for the agency’s enforcement attorneys. Many of those complaints were driven by new requirements placed on institutions like mortgage servicers, consumer credit bureaus, and student loan servicers to help customers survive Covid-19 pandemic-induced financial shortfalls.īanks, debt collectors, credit bureaus, and other companies have raised concerns that the CFPB’s database publicizes unverified consumer complaints.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau saw a 60% spike in consumer complaints in 2020, a development expected to lead to an increase in enforcement activity under the Biden administration, which has promised to be tougher on financial institutions.Ĭonsumers filed nearly 445,000 complaints with the bureau in 2020-the greatest one-year total on record-compared with 277,366 in 2019, according to a Bloomberg Law data analysis.

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