The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) modified its complaint process this week for consumers seeking to dispute information they believe is inaccurate or incomplete on their credit report.

Consumers will now be required to first formally submit the dispute to the credit reporting agency (CRA). Then, when making the complaint to the CFPB, the consumer must attest that at least 45 days have elapsed since they submitted the dispute to the CRA, or that the dispute with the CRA is no longer pending.

A notice on the CFPB’s website cautions:

“If you submit a complaint to the CFPB against a credit or consumer reporting agency about inaccurate or incomplete information without first disputing the information directly with that company:

• They may not respond to your complaint
• The CFPB will discontinue processing your complaint if the company alerts us that you did not first dispute the information with them directly”

The CFPB appears to have heeded some of the recent recommendations of the Consumer Data Industry Association (CDIA) in making this week’s changes to its complaint procedures. The CDIA is an industry trade group whose members include the “big three” credit bureaus — Equifax, Experian and TransUnion.

In a letter dated Jan. 27, the last day of the CFPB’s public comment period, CDIA executive Denise Norgle characterized the CFPB’s complaint portal as “a sort of ‘Yelp for Financial Services,’” referring to the popular website and mobile app for crowd-sourced business reviews.

Norgle, who serves as the association’s senior vice president of public policy, legal and regulatory affairs, asserted that complaints are often misattributed to CRAs when the “complained-of conduct relates to another party in the consumer reporting ecosystem,” and that “complaints submitted by fraudulent credit repair organizations are not flagged or segregated.”

She proposed that the CFPB should place a “prominent notice at the beginning of the complaint process” making it clear to consumers “that complaints, especially as they relate to credit reports and credit reporting agencies, should only be submitted if the consumer has already contacted the service provider and not received a satisfactory resolution, or the consumer believes that the service provider has not complied with its legal obligations.”

The CFPB did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the rationale behind the policy change.

The CDIA’s proposals were met with forceful criticism by the National Consumer Law Center (NCLC), an advocacy group that focuses on policies impacting low-income and underserved communities.

In a press release responding to the CDIA’s comment letter, the NCLC claimed that the proposed changes were designed to “make it harder for people to file complaints against credit reporting companies — and possibly against debt collectors, banks, and other big businesses.”

“Last year, consumers filed nearly five million complaints with the CFPB regarding credit reporting, mostly against the Big Three credit bureaus, one of the worst oligopolies in this country,” said Chi Chi Wu, the NCLC’s director of consumer reporting and data advocacy, in the press release.

Wu continued: “Those huge numbers reflect the massive issues caused by mistakes and other problems that people have with their credit reports. But instead of fixing these problems, which is supposed to be CFPB’s mission, [Acting Director] Russell Vought and his cronies appear ready to bow to the industry’s demands to sweep the problem under the rug by suppressing the volume of complaints.”

A spokesperson for the CDIA applauded the CFPB’s decision to modify its consumer complaint portal processes in an email to Scotsman Guide.

“This information is necessary to address the widespread misuse of the portal by some credit repair organizations and others engaged in credit-washing tactics aimed at removing accurate information from consumer reports,” the CDIA spokesperson stated, maintaining that those practices “divert resources away from consumers with legitimate concerns and undermine the integrity of the credit reporting system.”

A representative for the NCLC told Scotsman Guide that a coalition press release on the matter will be forthcoming on Monday.