Jesse Scheckner
Floridians may receive far fewer after-hours contacts from debt collectors under legislation now cleared for Gov. Ron DeSantis’ signature.
House members voted 116-0 for SB 232, which would update the Consumer Collection Practices Act, a more than 30-year-old state law meant to shield consumers from unfair or abusive debt collection practices.
The Senate passed the bill unanimously April 16.
The updates SB 232 brings are overdue, said the bill’s House sponsor, Highland Beach Republican Rep. Peggy Gossett-Seidman.
“Obviously, we’ve had so many different technologies such as cellphones, text messages, emails, push notifications,” she said. “Due to a lack of clarity and misunderstanding in terms of communication, the push notifications, texts and emails have come overnight at all hours, multiple times, to debtors.”
Gossett-Seidman said the legislation, which Doral Republican Sen. Ana Maria Rodriguez carried in the upper chamber, is the product of conversations she had with a constituent about “a number of class-action lawsuits” that resulted from the current law’s outdated language.
“It was described as ‘bees to honey,’ the number of businesses and entities jumping onto the bill,” she said, adding that one lawyer in Florida had gone so far as to have a personalized license plate numbered to match the “outdated statute.”
SB 232 reenacts relevant clauses in the Consumer Collection Practices Act and clarifies that debt collectors are prohibited from initiating calls, text messages, push notifications and any other form of contact other than email between 9 p.m. and 8 a.m.
The bill, effective July 1, is likely to impact millions of Floridians. Thirteen percent of residents have debt in collections, exceeding the national average of 11%, according to information Gossett-Seidman’s Office collected and shared.
Last year alone, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received 148,862 debt collection complaints from Florida. The year before, the Federal Trade Commission recorded more than 81,000 complaints about debt collection misconduct in Florida, the second-most nationally.
Gossett-Seidman tabled her version of the bill (HB 147) in favor of SB 232 ahead of the unanimous vote Tuesday.
