The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau just did something that Democrats, at one point, asked it to do.
Not a typo.
But as one might expect in these partisan times, the correlation between request and action is not direct.
In November 2021, less than two weeks after the Senate confirmed Rohit Chopra to lead the agency, seven Democratic senators urged the CFPB to address what they saw as a high volume of errors appearing on consumers’ credit reports.
Particularly, the lawmakers wanted the bureau to evaluate whether credit reporting errors reflected failures by credit bureaus Experian, Equifax and TransUnion for not devoting “sufficient personnel and resources for dispute resolution.”
More than 58% of complaints on the CFPB’s consumer complaint portal in 2020 pertained to credit and consumer reporting, the bureau said.
Fast-forward a few more years, and credit reporting accounted for more than 88% of complaints on the portal in 2025. Beyond that, the number of overall portal complaints has jumped tenfold in five years – from 542,300 in 2020 to nearly 5.6 million last year.
The CFPB on Wednesday published new language on three successive landing pages, demanding that consumers “first dispute inaccurate or incomplete information on their credit report with the credit reporting agency.” On the consumer complaint page, that text is bold and in all-caps for subtlety.
The CFPB will discontinue processing complaints, it said, if a credit reporting agency alerts the bureau that the consumer did not first dispute the information directly with a credit bureau first.
Further, the CFPB demands that consumers wait 45 days after directing their complaints to a credit reporting agency before contacting the bureau. That’s the amount of time credit reporting agencies are allowed before being required to respond.
“By prematurely submitting your complaint here,” the CFPB writes on the second landing page, “you are impeding the system from serving other consumers who have correctly followed the process.”
The third landing page contains an attestation: that the consumer asserts the information provided is true, to their knowledge; that they’ve contacted a credit reporting agency; and that either 45 days have elapsed, or that the dispute is no longer pending.
Wednesday’s language changes come roughly two months after the CFPB sought public comment on ways to "minimize the burden of the collection of information” on consumers.
However, the nation’s three credit bureaus – Equifax, Experian and TransUnion – and trade groups that represent them have argued that the CFPB’s complaint portal has been overrun by submissions generated by bots or third-party credit repair companies posing as consumers.
"It is getting to a boiling point where you're seeing so many more of these complaints filed with boiler-plate language," David Pommerehn, the Consumer Bankers Association's general counsel and head of regulatory affairs, told American Banker.
Philip Bohi, general counsel at the American Financial Services Association, called the CFPB landing pages “a great step in the right direction.”
“We are just trying to reduce the number of complaints to the CFPB's complaint portal that are not appropriate to be there,” Bohi said in a statement.
With its language, the CFPB appears to have followed the suggestion of the Consumer Data Industry Association, which commented that the CFPB “place a prominent notice at the beginning of the complaint process,” emphasizing that consumers’ first point of contact should be a bank, credit issuer or furnisher rather than the CFPB.
It remains to be seen, however, whether that trade group’s other suggestions will be followed. The CDIA also asked the CFPB to implement two-factor authentication, limit the number of complaints that can be filed per phone number, and restrict the number of complaints stemming from a single internet protocol address.
Chi Chi Wu, the director of consumer reporting and credit advocacy at the National Consumer Law Center, said that may create a hurdle for low- or middle-income consumers who may not have a home internet connection, or file a complaint through a credit counselor or at a library.
That hews closer to the Democratic senators’ stated intention from 2021: namely, that, consumers in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, as well as younger consumers, were more likely to have disputes on their credit reports – and that any credit errors could have a profound effect on job and homeowning prospects, a CFPB report said at the time.
In any case, Wu told American Banker, the CFPB “seem[s] to be trying to deter consumers from filing complaints in a rather heavy-handed manner.”
If the CFPB’s effort is simply meant to curb skyrocketing portal complaints, it’s at least more consumer-friendly than disabling the portal altogether.
