On Compliance: Telephone Consumer Protection Act

While there have been countless articles, webinars and presentations on the Telephone Consumer Protection Act and the 2015 Federal Communication Commission Declaratory Ruling and Order clarifying TCPA, I have clients and friends in the credit union industry that remain unconcerned about their risks. In this article, I hope to provide you with six reasons that the TCPA and the FCC rules must be on your radar for risk management.

Reason #1: All your phones are autodialers.

Many of the “unconcerned” have sagely advised me that the TCPA consent provisions only apply to autodialers, and their credit unions don’t use autodialers. Although it has been said many time in many ways, let me add my voice to the message: Every phone in your credit union is an autodialer under the rule. An autodialer, as defined by the FCC, is any telephone equipment that has the capacity to store or produce and dial random or sequential numbers even if it is not presently used for that purpose.

While some phones and phone systems currently lack the capacity to meet the “autodialer” definition, the FCC has expanded the definition of autodialer to include phones and phone systems that can be modified or reconfigured in the future to meet the “autodialer” definition.

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