The American Financial Services Association likes the path the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is currently taking and hopes the regulator stays on it.

AFSA recapped on Wednesday that the association joined an industry panel earlier this week organized by the House Financial Services Committee majority staff. In a blog post, AFSA responded when asked to compare bureau activities under former director Rohit Chopra to ones led by acting director Russell Vought

“We noted that today the bureau is better aligned to meet the legitimate concerns of consumers while ensuring a properly functioning financial services industry,” AFSA wrote. “AFSA and the other industry leaders emphasized that political shifts could bring less-helpful changes to that balance, and the committee sought suggestions for how to ensure the agency maintained this new alignment permanently.

“Among the suggestions AFSA put forward was the need for structural improvements (e.g., placing the bureau under appropriations and thus congressional oversight, making it a bipartisan commission, giving it an inspector general, etc.). AFSA also noted that the current bureau is not enforcing or has pared back many of the Biden administration regulations, and how full rescission of the Chopra-era rules would be more effective in making these changes permanent,” AFSA continued.

The association also mentioned that it touched on auto financing during the session.

“When asked whether other rules needed to be completed, AFSA noted that the vehicle finance larger participant rule is still in process. AFSA also emphasized the need for the bureau to follow the Administrative Procedure Act and not govern by blog post or enforcement. AFSA emphasized the need for UDAAP reform and further reforms to the CFPB’s complaint database.”

Speaking of that database, the CFPB recently acknowledged in a news release that, “The consumer complaint portal has long been plagued by issues that severely limit its effectiveness in addressing consumers’ complaints and practical utility of its information.”

As a result, the CFPB said it has recently taken multiple actions to address these issues and is continuing its work with credit reporting agencies (CRAs) and other enterprises to increase effectiveness of the process, while aligning it with the statutory authorities.

Among the moves the bureau mentioned:

—Revising its portal manual to ensure that CRAs follow a standardized process in addressing complaints

—Enhancing identity protections

—Aligning the complaint process to statutory obligations

—Focusing resources on complaints that warrant a substantive response

—Educating consumers about how to address errors on their credit reports

—Increasing the efficiency of the complaint process

Bureau officials also explained in the news release how long and to what magnitude complaint database problems have become.

In 2019, the bureau said it received more than 150,000 credit or consumer reporting complaints. In 2025, that number grew to more than 5 million, which is an increase of more than 3,700%.

Amidst this record complaint volume, the CFPB said the nationwide consumer reporting agencies — Equifax, Experian, and TransUnion — reported making more updates and deletions to inaccurate tradelines than in prior years.

In 2024, officials said the credit bureaus closed more than 1.3 million complaints with non-monetary relief. Last year, that number grew to 2.1 million, according to the CFPB.

“The increase is driven by many — sometimes, overlapping — factors: credit repair organizations and credit clinics misusing the bureau’s complaint process as a tool of their business, social media influencers with questionable expertise encouraging followers to submit complaints, adoption of new technologies (e.g., ‘AI tools’) that may act as an individual’s agent, and the emergence of new businesses that seek to boost credit scores by disputing accurate information on consumers’ reports,” the CFPB said.

The bureau also pointed out that the credit bureaus have not been uniformly reporting how they respond to the growing number of consumer complaints.

“The bureau has been collaborating with the NCRAs to better understand their complaint handling practices, and to ensure consumers receive timely, complete, and accurate responses to their credit reporting complaints. Credit reporting complaints represent the largest share of all complaints submitted to the bureau,” officials said.

“Without addressing these issues, the CFPB cannot rely upon the consumer complaint portal data as a reliable reflection of actual market conditions or actual consumer experiences,” they went on to say.