A federal agency chartered to protect consumers is considering changes that could leave people in the dark about the nation’s most predatory companies.
In a notice set to be published in the Federal Register on Tuesday, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is seeking public comment on “potential changes” to its publication of consumer complaint information, including data on the most complained about financial corporations.
The CFPB regularly publishes reports about consumer complaints, with granulated detail at the state-level, including complaint trends over time, product reliability, and biggest offenders.
The filing doesn’t detail what specific changes the agency is considering, but it does posit several questions suggesting the CFPB may drawback its corporate transparency initiative.
For example, one topic asks: “Whether it is net beneficial or net harmful to the transparent and efficient operation of markets for consumer financial products and services for the Bureau to publish the names of the most-complained-about companies.”
In another question for public comment, the CFPB asks if the bureau “should share more, less, or the same amount of information on month-to-month trends.”
In 2015, the CFPB began publishing its consumer complaint reports on a monthly basis.
The agency, however, stopped the practice in November—the same month Obama-appointee Richard Cordray announced that he planned to step down ahead of schedule.
Not a single monthly consumer report has been published since top White House aide Mick Mulvaney took over as interim CFPB director in January.
As of publication, the agency did not respond to a request for comment on the lapse.
Should the CFPB draw back its public reporting on the matter, it could save misbehaving companies a lot of embarrassment. Industries like debt collection, mortgage finance, and credit reporting are frequently represented atop the agency’s list of most complained about companies in America.
The move would also comport with other actions taken by interim director Mulvaney to shield predatory financial actors from the CFPB’s enforcement reach. He has dropped investigations, withdrawn from federal lawsuits against abusive lenders, and frozen the implementation of new regulations.
Most notably, Mulvaney suspended a new rule that cracked down on payday loan sharks.
