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Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

CFPB releases county-level info on consumer complaints

Federal Issues CFPB Consumer Complaints Cities & Counties

Federal Issues

On April 28, the CFPB released a newly updated consumer complaint bulletin analyzing complaints submitted in 2020 in counties nationwide and providing a county-level visualization of identified trends. According to the report, while a total of 514,102 complaints were reported to the Bureau in 2020, the agency received “more complaints per capita from consumers living in predominantly minority counties.” Highlights of the bulletin include: (i) consumer complaints increased across all demographic groups from 2019 to 2020; (ii) consumers living in predominantly minority counties submitted more complaints on a per capita basis in nearly every one of the 11 product categories about which the Bureau accepts complaints and; (iii) credit or consumer reporting causes more issues for consumers in predominantly minority counties. The CFPB announced it will soon “expand demographic collection to include household size and income” and “enhance its complaint form to give consumers the option to provide household size and household income when submitting a complaint.”

As previously covered by InfoBytes, the CFPB published its Consumer Response Annual Report for 2020, providing a review of the Bureau’s complaint process and a description of complaints received from consumers in all 50 states and the District of Columbia between January 1 and December 31, 2020.