CFPB issues Office of Servicemember Affairs 2020 Annual Report

Happy Friday compliance friends!  My name is Becky Harris, and I am one of two new Regulatory Compliance Counsels at NAFCU.  This is my inaugural blog post, and I’d like to use my first impression to talk about our nation’s 1.4 million servicemembers, and the top issues that impact their financial lives.

On May 6, 2021, the CFPB’s Office of Servicemember Affairs (OSA) published its 2020 annual report summarizing its activities and servicemember complaints from 2020.  We previously blogged about the CFPB’s 2020 Consumer Response Annual Report, which included servicemember complaint data but did not focus on the specific concerns faced by servicemembers, which the OSA report does.  Here, I’ll cover the top complaints that servicemembers submitted last year.

The CFPB received about 40,800 servicemember complaints in 2020 – a 14% increase from 2019 – the largest annual complaint volume from servicemembers since the bureau’s inception in 2011.  Complaints mentioning coronavirus or related keywords represented about 8% of the 2020 servicemember complaint submissions; however, the absence of a COVID-19 or coronavirus keyword in a complaint does not mean the complaint was not related to the financial impact of the pandemic.

 

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