Consumer Complaint Narratives, Controversial From The Start, No Longer Included In CFPB Database

On August 14^th, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) published a press release stating that they would no longer permit consumer complaint narratives to appear in their flagship Consumer Complaint Database.  When the CFPB started collecting consumer complaints in 2011, they made the bold decision in 2013 to make the Consumer Complaint Database public and to disclose “certain consumer complaint data.”  The norm had been, and still is, for agencies that collect consumer complaints to distribute only limited information about the complaints they receive, and to not include the narratives.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), for example, whose Consumer Sentinel database has been active for decades still does not publish consumer complaint narratives.  Through several tools available on the FTC's website it is possible to examine the database through various lenses, however.  That same kind of examination of consumer complaint categories and volumes that are available today