This National Consumer Law Center (NCLC) annual advisory on tax-time consumer protection issues includes: Stimulus payments and the COVID crisis. This year brings even greater confusion and complexity to tax filing than usual because of the economic fallout from COVID-19: Tax season was delayed for several weeks because of changes to the tax law from…
Congress has enacted extraordinary relief for families hard hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. That relief includes two rounds of Economic Impact Payments (EIPs) and measures to help the poorest families, who got even poorer in 2020, to claim the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) despite a lack of income in 2020. President Biden has also…
Criminal justice debt has soared in recent years as governments have attempted to use fines and fees to cover the growing costs of the bloated criminal justice system, as well as government operations generally. The result has been disastrous.
Read More about Criminal Justice Debt: 2021 Federal Priorities
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued debt collection regulations at the end of 2020. These rules enacted some provisions to benefit consumers, such as requiring collectors to comply with oral “stop calling” request and prohibiting credit reporting without first giving notice of the alleged debt to the consumer.
To protect families who are struggling to make ends meet in the face of mushrooming debt, and tohelp workers and the economy recover from the COVID-19 crisis, Congress should: ▪ Adopt a temporary moratorium on the garnishment of wages and bank accounts.▪ Permanently increase the amount of wages protected from garnishment to prevent pushingfamilies into…
Distance online education is now the fastest growing segment of higher education. Most states, however, have abdicated their responsibility to protect the increasing number of online education students from predatory and illegal practices of for-profit education companies. Most allow out-of-state companies to enroll online students without complying with important state consumer protections for postsecondary students,…
Before the pandemic, 68 million people in the United States had debt in collection. Economic fallout from job loss and reduced hours related to the coronavirus pandemic have hit families hard with millions struggling to pay their bills and communities of color hit hardest by these economic hardships. Millions of additional consumers are likely to…
Read More about How Congress and the CFPB Can Protect Americans from Abusive Debt Collection
Even before COVID-19, student loan borrowers struggled under the weight of more than $1.6 trillion in debt. One in four borrowers was in default or serious delinquency, and many worried about their ability to make student loan payments while covering other basic needs. Because of decades of structural inequities and discrimination, student loans have burdened…
Americans receive more than 50 billion unwanted robocalls and robotexts a year, many of them dangerous scams that defraud consumers of hundreds of millions of dollars. Congress and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) must act to clamp down on these invasive and dangerous calls.
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