CFPB Says Consumers Complain About Credit Reporting Agencies

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said on Tuesday (April 26) that its latest monthly consumer complaint snapshot shows that there are problems afoot tied to servicing agencies when homebuyers are unable to make timely payments. Through April 1 and since the CFPB has been tracking complaints in the past three years, there have been 859,000 complaints across all categories.

Among the top complaints: For the month, there were more than 8,240 debt collection complaints to the CFPB, which was 30 percent of all complaints submitted in the month of March. Complaints tied to credit reporting were up 35 percent through February and March. In total, there were 3,321 complaints submitted to the bureau regarding credit reports. The areas that had the highest incidence of complaints included Washington, D.C., Florida, Maryland and Delaware, as measured by complaints per 100,000 people. The most often cited companies: Equifax, TransUnion and Experian.

In the product spotlight that focused on the $10 trillion mortgage market and despite the two and a half years that has led to CFPB-crafted requirements by lenders to ascertain that borrowers can afford their mortgages, there have been 223,100 complaints about mortgages. Just over half of those complaints centered on the mortgage and loss mitigation process, with repeated requests for the same documentation, while foreclosure notifications were conflicting or erroneous. Communication with servicers remained difficult, too, said consumers. In addition, there remained confusion about the status of loan transfers, with some consumers stating that they had not known of such activity tied to their own mortgages, the CFPB said in its most recent monthly report.

As noted by the bureau in the report, in its snapshot of a single state – California — mortgages remained the top area of complaints in the state.