InfoBytes Blog
Florida Attorney General Rolls Out Military Consumer Protection Program; CFPB Publishes Annual Servicemember Report
On May 17, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced a new consumer protection program designed to spread awareness and help prevent deceptive business practices affecting military and veteran communities. The Military and Veterans Assistance Program (MVAP) will provide resources and information to consumers on emerging scams and other consumer protection related issues, as well as encourage open communication among local, state, and federal partners to help ensure complaints are handled appropriately.
On May 16, the CFPB’s Office of Servicemember Affairs (OSA) published its fifth annual servicemember report, The Office of Servicemember Affairs: Charting our course through the military lifecycle, and a follow-up blog post outlining the work the office has conducted over the past five years and the work it intends to do in the future. The structure of the report—designed to be presented within the construct of the “military lifecycle”—presents the ways that “many common and some uniquely-military consumer issues . . . fit within that continuum.” Under the Dodd-Frank Act, OSA monitors servicemember complaints about consumer financial products or services and coordinates with the efforts of federal and state agencies to improve measures and provide assistance. As of April 1, 2017, the OSA reports that it has handled approximately 74,800 complaints submitted by servicemembers, veterans, and their families since July 2011, of which 42 percent related to debt collection, 18 percent to mortgages, and 11 percent to credit reporting. In total, the OSA claims it has provided approximately $3.3 million in monetary relief to military consumers who submitted complaints to the CFPB.