The regulator has developed a standardized process for credit reporting agencies (CRAs) to follow when addressing complaints, enhanced identity protections, aligned the complaint process to statutory obligations, focused resources on complaints that warrant a substantive response, educated consumers about how to address errors in the credit reports, and increased the efficiency of the complaint process, it said in a press release.
One of the issues these changes are designed to address is abuse of the complaint process. This issue is reflected in the more than 3,700% increase in credit or consumer reporting complaint volume seen between 2019 and 2025. During that time, the number of such complaints leapt from 150,000 per year to 5 million per year, according to the release.
“The increase is driven by many — sometimes, overlapping — factors: credit repair organizations and credit clinics misusing the Bureau’s complaint process as a tool of their business, social media influencers with questionable expertise encouraging followers to submit complaints, adoption of new technologies (e.g., ‘AI tools’) that may act as an individual’s agent, and the emergence of new businesses that seek to boost credit scores by disputing accurate information on consumers’ reports,” CFPB said in the release.
The changes made by the CFPB are meant to ensure CRAs’ response rates are appropriately high, remind consumers that they should exhaust their dispute rights with the CRA before coming to the bureau, and protect the complaint system from users who abuse the system, according to the release.
The CFPB said in March that 88% of all complaints filed in 2025 were tied to credit or consumer reporting.
The National Consumer Law Center, a consumer advocacy group, said in January that the number of complaints submitted to the CFPB about credit reporting reflect genuine issues and that changes to the agency’s complaint system could reduce the number of complaints filed.
“Those numbers reflect the massive issues caused by mistakes and other problems that people have with their credit report,” the NCLC said at the time in a press release.
