Study of third-party debt collection operations
In order to better understand the operational costs of debt collection firms, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (Bureau) conducted a survey of debt collection firms and vendors to the debt collection industry. The study consisted of a written survey that was sent to debt collection firms, telephone interviews with a subset of the respondents to the survey, and telephone interviews with vendors. The Bureau asked questions about employees, type of debt collected, clients, vendors, software, policies and procedures for consumer interaction, disputes, furnishing data to credit bureaus, litigation, and compliance. This report describes the survey and summarizes survey responses.