State Looks to Drop Dual-Consent Recordings of Collectors

Maybe collectors shouldn’t hold so many conferences in Las Vegas.  In the same week the Speaker of Nevada’s General Assembly proposed severe restrictions on healthcare collections in the state, another bill aimed exclusively at debt collectors was debated in the same legislative body.

On Wednesday, hearings were held to discuss AB 127, a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Debbie Smith, a Democrat from Sparks, NV.  The bill, initially introduced in late February, has one purpose: to allow consumers to record conversations with debt collectors without the collectors’ consent.  More bad news: it has a ton of co-sponsors.

Nevada is one of the holdout dual-consent states in the country.  There are only about a dozen or so states that require the consent of both parties to record a phone call.  Naturally, there are exceptions to the rule: a court ordered wiretap, emergency phone calls, and certain calls made to and from prisons.  AB 127 seeks to add one more exception in the form of collection calls.

The hearings were filled with emotional pleas for consumer protection, including the trotting-out of the complaint numbers against collectors in 2005, per the FTC.  But collection agencies also got a say in the matter.

According to the Las Vegas Sun, collection agency owner Davis Stone pointed out that recordings can be manipulated digitally, given America’s obsession with mash-ups and amateur audio/video: "Phone call recordings are extremely unreliable, especially in this day and age, when manipulating a phone call recording is as easy as clicking a computer mouse. This gives desperate or creative debtors license to record a conversation, manipulate it, and sue the agency. The debtor is the only person who has control of the recording. They can do whatever they want with that," said Stone.

Will this law, if passed, impact the ARM industry?  Not a whole lot, probably.  As previously stated, single-consent recordings are the norm and agencies have been dealing with that for a while.  But still: ouch, Nevada.