The Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) Final Rule

The Federal Communications Commission issued its final rule on the handling of automated federal debt collection calls under the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (TCPA) last week.  The rule, which will become effective 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register, implements the Bipartisan Budget Act of 2015. The act created an exemption from the TCPA prior express consent rules for calls and text messages “made solely to collect a debt owed to or guaranteed by the United States.” New requirements include:

• Debt collection calls and/or texts will fall under the exemption for federal debts if the consumer is delinquent at the time the call is made, or at an imminent risk of delinquency as a result of the terms or operation of the loan program itself, and in the 30 days before such an event; and
  
• The exemption only applies to existing debts for which the United States is currently the owner or guarantor of the debt. Note that the FCC did not clarify which federal debts are included or excluded from coverage.

In addition, federal debt collection calls and texts:

• May only be made to the consumer or another person or entity legally responsible for paying the debt;
  
• Must only be about the debt in question, as any marketing content will transform the call into a non-exempt telemarketing call;
  
• May only be made to one of three categories of wireless telephone numbers:
• Can only be made between 8 a.m. and 9 p.m., of the called party’s time zone; and
  
• Can only be made by the federal government or its contractor.

Consumers also have the ability to stop federal debt collection calls at any point, and debtors may make this request to the caller.

  Medicare announces unique beneficiary numbers start April 2018 

In terms of timeline and implementation, in 2018, CMS will be generating new Medicare billing identifiers (MBI) for all Medicare beneficiaries, both living and deceased (archived).  New Medicare cards will start being distributed by April 2018; the MBI will replace the HICN on Medicare cards and gender and signature will be removed from the Medicare cards.  At such time, all systems and business processes will need to be able to accept and process transactions using the new MBI by April 2018.  It is currently estimated that over 60 million Medicare cards with the MBI will be distributed to beneficiaries between April 2018 and April 2019.

Further, CMS will have a transition period where both HICN and MBI may be exchanged with CMS.  The transition period is currently planned to begin in April 2018 and end on December 31, 2019.  After this transition period, CMS will no longer accept the HICN, but with certain limited exceptions.  Further, in communicating with CMS, the MBI must be used instead of the HICN in communications and data exchanges with CMS after the period of transition.