The Federal Communications Commission announced yesterday that it would vote at its March 22 meeting on a proposal to establish a database of phone numbers that have been relinquished by one individual and reassigned to another individual. Under the FCC’s existing Telephone Consumer Protection Act regulations, a bank or other company is liable for a call made in good faith to a party who has consented to receive the call but whose telephone number has been reassigned to another consumer — unbeknownst to the caller.
The FCC’s proposal seeks comment on how such a database should be constructed, used and funded. In its proposal, the FCC expressed tentative support for the establishment of a single database of reassigned numbers, noting that a single database would be “more efficient and cost-effective” than an approach that reports reassigned number information to multiple commercial data aggregators.
In an earlier comment letter, the American Bankers Association urged the FCC to create a centrally administered database of reassigned numbers. For more information, contact ABA’s Jonathan Thessin.
