Emanuel Cleaver: “Let me, first of all, thank Chairwoman Waters for including my legislation, my Debt Collection Improvement Act, into the…”

“Let me, first of all, thank Chairwoman Waters for including my legislation, my Debt Collection Improvement Act, into the Stop Debt Collection Abuse Act, which would, among other things, extend the protections in the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to debt owed to a Federal, State, territory, District of Columbia, and local government agency, and limit the excessive fees that debt collectors may charge. The Fair Debt Collection Practices Act was enacted in 1978 to eliminate abusive debt collection practices by debt collectors and to ensure that those debt collectors who refrain from using abusive debt collection practices were not competitively disadvantaged. Congress has found abundant evidence of the use of abusive, deceptive, and unfair debt collection practices by many debt collectors, and Congress expressly found that abusive debt collection practices contribute to social ills. Those findings are still true today. Unfortunately, when Congress enacted the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act in 1978, it did not apply the law to debt collectors hired by Federal Government entities. As one witness before the Financial Services Committee pointed out, extending the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to debt collectors hired by government entities is important because collection by or on behalf of the government is already unusually coercive as a result of the government's immense and unrivaled police power and other means of seizing citizens' assets.…”