When a bank wrongly charges fees, a debt collector pursues someone over a disputed bill, or a mortgage servicer misapplies payments, Americans do have a formal path for recourse: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Filing a complaint with the CFPB is not simply an act of frustration, like posting a review online. Companies are legally obligated to respond within a defined timeframe, typically within 15 days. This legal requirement distinguishes the CFPB from most other consumer complaint channels, giving it a level of authority that ensures companies must engage with the issue rather than ignore it.

“The CFPB complaint has some legal teeth to it, and the company has to respond,” said Mayank Kejriwal, Principal Scientist at USC’s Information Sciences Institute and Research Associate Professor at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. He co-authored a study published in PNAS Nexus examining how companies respond to complaints. Because responses are mandatory, the research did not focus on whether companies replied, but rather on how long they took. The distinction is crucial, as response time becomes the real indicator of how effectively the system serves different groups.

Analysing more than 1.27 million complaints filed between 2014 and 2022, the researchers found that response rates were consistently high—exceeding 98% across all populations. On the surface, this suggests a system functioning as intended. However, a deeper look reveals a persistent and widening disparity: older Americans and service members tend to receive slower responses than the general population. While nearly all complaints are acknowledged, the timeliness of those responses varies in ways that disproportionately affect more vulnerable groups.

For service members, including active-duty personnel, reservists, and veterans, slower response times appeared every year in the dataset. The gap reached its peak in 2016 at 1.8 percentage points before narrowing somewhat, settling at 0.3 points by 2022. The pattern for older Americans is more concerning. In 2014, seniors experienced slightly faster responses than average, but that advantage gradually disappeared. By 2017, parity had been reached, and by 2022, older adults were experiencing the slowest response times among all groups, indicating a clear and unfavourable shift over time.

Socioeconomic conditions further intensified these disparities. Older individuals living in economically disadvantaged areas faced the longest delays observed in the study. At the same time, the data likely underestimates the true extent of the problem. The individuals captured in CFPB records are those who were aware of the system, believed it could help, and were able to navigate the complaint process. Many others—particularly those facing technological barriers, low financial literacy, or unstable living conditions—are excluded entirely, meaning the most vulnerable populations may not be represented in the data at all.

The CFPB, established in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, remains a central mechanism for consumer financial protection in the United States. Yet its effectiveness depends heavily on both access and processing efficiency. Complaints from older Americans often involve more complex issues such as medical debt, foreclosure, or fraud, requiring additional documentation and time to resolve. Combined with gaps in knowledge about how to file effective complaints, these factors can slow the process further. As Kejriwal suggests, targeted support to help vulnerable groups submit clearer, more complete complaints could reduce these disparities and improve outcomes for those who rely most on the system.

More information: Yidan Sun et al, Examining persistent inequities in financial complaint resolution for older Americans and veterans in the United States, PNAS Nexus. DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag086

Journal information: PNAS Nexus Provided by University of Southern California