By: Valerie Hayes, ACA General Counsel and Vice President of Legal and Government Affairs

With hundreds of millions of telephone contacts to consumers each year, automatic dialing and announcing devices (ADADs) are significant technological advances to aid convenience and efficiency, having become firmly cemented as invaluable tools of the trade for collection agencies.

Governed by the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) and state laws, ADAD users must take great care to ensure compliance. Now, a proposed rule change to the TCPA by the Federal Communications Commission, which an ACA International led coalition is aggressively opposing, could dramatically change the landscape for debt collectors using ADAD technology.

The FCC proposed rule would require collectors to obtain express written consent from a consumer to contact the consumer on his or her cell phone.

ACA is leading a coalition to oppose this new rule and to obtain a legislative fix for the TCPA to address this issue. The coalition includes critical trade associations and large companies representing banks, insurance, telecommunications, retail, airlines and several other major sectors of the U.S. economy.

To date, the coalition has successfully encouraged the U.S. Department of Education, the Treasury’s Financial Management Service and the Federal Reserve to formally weigh in with the FCC in support of our position. Additionally, the coalition successfully attracted 11 bipartisan members of the influential House Energy and Commerce Committee to submit a letter to the FCC opposing the proposed rule.

Other significant TCPA regulations of relevance to debt collectors when using an ADAD or prerecorded message:

1. Autodialers or an artificial or prerecorded voice may not be used to place calls to any emergency numbers, health care facilities, telephones assigned to wireless services or any other number for which the consumer is charged for the call.

2. Debt collectors must obtain a consumer’s prior express consent to call the consumer’s residential line using a prerecorded message.

3. Debt collectors are not required to identify the caller’s state-registered name in prerecorded messages if doing so would conflict with federal or state laws. Where such a conflict does exist, the debt collector may identify herself by individual name. The FCC requires debt collectors to state clearly the telephone number (other than that of an autodialer or prerecorded message player that placed the call) of the business.

New technologies have transformed how consumers communicate, and expect to be communicated with, by friends, family and companies with whom they have a business relationship. Effective, legal communication between businesses and consumers is a vital component of a strong consumer protection environment. Debt collectors need to have policies and procedures in place to ensure compliance with the TCPA. These policies and procedures should address the collector’s process for obtaining and documenting consent to call consumers’ wireless numbers, whether and how collectors scrub their databases for wireless numbers and the information provided in prerecorded messages left for consumers.

ACA International will be releasing a Guide to the Telephone Consumer Protection Act later this month. Please visit the ACA International website for more information.