Bailiffs came for creditors – Newspaper Kommersant No. 227 (7428) dated 07.12.
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The Federal Bailiff Service (FSSP) will control the collection of overdue debts of individuals by creditors represented by banks and MFIs. Market participants do not argue with the logic of such a decision, but doubt that the FSSP will cope with a sharp increase in the load without additional funding or loss of control quality.
On December 6, the State Duma adopted in the first reading a bill on the reform of collection activities. The amendments affected the laws “On the protection of the rights and legitimate interests of individuals in the implementation of activities to return overdue debts” and “On microfinance activities and microfinance organizations”.
Now the activities of banks and MFIs that work with overdue debts of individuals will be controlled by the FSSP. Previously, the service dealt with this only in relation to professional collection agencies included in the register of the Ministry of Justice.
The decision is due to the fact that the FSSP is receiving more and more complaints about debt collection activities specifically against MFIs and banks.
So, according to the results of ten months of 2022, the service received 31.7 thousand applications from citizens (15% more than in the same period last year). Of the total volume of complaints, only 14% concerned the activities of professional collectors, while 50% – MFIs, 24% – credit institutions.
After the adopted amendments come into force, creditors will have to use special equipment when communicating with debtors and record all the facts of interaction. Records must be kept for three years. In addition, there will be a restriction on any communication with the debtor for a period of 60 days.
The bill assumes that the FSSP will maintain a list of banks and MFIs that carry out collection activities. As a result, the number of organizations controlled by bailiffs will grow from 400 to 2.2 thousand. Due to what reserves the service can cope with such a volume, the materials do not specify. The FSSP was unable to promptly respond to Kommersant’s request.
This issue has already been raised at the mid-November conference of the National Association of Professional Collection Agencies (NAPCA). The representative of the FSSP, who was present there, only assured that “the department is fully prepared” to expand its functions. On the sidelines of the conference, it was discussed that in the current circumstances and in the absence of serious additional funding, the service will be able to exercise control over new subjects only formally.
Dmitry Aristovdirector of the FSSP, in an interview TASS Nov. 1:
“If we talk about the supervision of organizations that are in the state register of services, then it is worth noting here that there are much fewer complaints from citizens about them than about credit and microfinance organizations.”
The Collections Reform Bill was introduced on 2 September (see “Kommersant” of September 5), provoking heated discussions in the market. A working group created by industry participants sent their proposals to legislators, which were not taken into account in the end.
Collectors support the assignment of supervision of all persons carrying out collection activities to one body. “However, the current text differs significantly from the one that was developed and agreed upon back in 2020,” said NAPCA President Elman Mehdiyev. There are no definitions of the concepts of “telephone calls”, “voice messages” as methods of interaction during collection, the possibilities of sending information on debt through the Unified Portal of Public Services are severely limited, the rules specifying the procedure for using modern technologies (robots) are not described, the rules specifying the possibility of using alphanumeric names when sending messages to debtors, he lists.
For the collection industry, such a reform is a positive scenario, says Yury Fedyukin, managing partner of Enterprise Legal Solutions, banks and MFOs, which often have half-hearted collectors due to a more profitable and efficient scheme for such collection, will be forced to whitewash their activities, as getting into the register of the supervisory authority strengthens risks of punishment for breaking the law. But the reform does not release debtors from their obligations, the expert emphasizes, “and collectors are unlikely to revise their usual methods of influence.”
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