CFPB’s Repeat Offender Unit

The CFPB established the Repeat Offender Unit in 2022 and a registry to detect and deter repeat offenders in 2024. It is critical to ensure that large market actors not treat fines and penalties as a cost of doing business.

The Repeat Offender Unit is a specialized team that is responsible for ensuring that supervised entities comply with all requirements of CFPB law enforcement orders. The unit focuses on entities with a history of non-compliance, failures to implement corrective actions resulting from CFPB examinations, and/or general non-cooperation with CFPB requests or directives.

The unit was established to dedicate resources specifically focused on ensuring that companies do not treat orders as suggestions. The unit consolidates order oversight from across the CFPB’s regions and ensures that orders are enforced consistently across all regions. This leads to greater operational efficiency, quicker issue resolution, and more effective communication between the CFPB and supervised entities. Uniform order oversight means entities always have a consistent source of information about their order status.

Here is how the unit’s heightened monitoring and order management process works:

1. Identification of Entities for Enhanced Monitoring: the unit identifies entities with a history of repeat violations by leveraging data and intelligence gathered from various sources, including consumer complaints, regulatory submissions, prior CFPB examination work, and monitoring activity.
2. Order Management: The unit assigns a team to each order. That team is responsible for oversight, monitoring, communication with the entity, and oversight and coordination of follow-up supervisory activity for the life of the order.
3. Examination and Investigation: Entities under order are subjected to thorough review, investigation, and examination, to determine the extent of any new or continued non-compliance and the impact on consumers.
4. Enforcement: Where appropriate, the unit will recommend that repeat offender entities be subjected to additional legal action beyond monetary penalties, including restrictions on their business activities and liability for senior management.

Repeat offender oversight is a focus for the CFPB beyond its supervisory and enforcement programs. In 2024, the CFPB finalized rules to create a registry of nonbank companies subject to certain orders, like law enforcement actions. The registry will provide critical intelligence for federal, state, and local law enforcement to ensure that lawbreaking companies cannot violate existing orders or reach into new geographies to defraud or otherwise harm the public.

By focusing on identifying, preventing, and curing persistent non-compliance, the unit aims to enforce accountability and protect consumers from harmful practices.