WASHINGTON, D.C. -

Multiple industry associations disagree with how the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau orchestrates its complaint database. Now a top federal examiner whose primary responsibility is “to detect and deter waste, fraud and abuse,” according to its own website, is questioning how the CFPB is handling this process.

The latest audit report from the Office of Inspector General (OIG) detailed eight recommendations the CFPB can make to its complaint database, which the bureau indicated had grown to more than 677,000 complaints.

“We identified areas in which management controls should be improved to enhance the accuracy and completeness of the consumer complaint database,” OIG said in its report.

“The Office of Consumer Response has implemented controls to monitor the accuracy of complaint data in the internal case management system, which contains all consumer complaints received by the CFPB, but it has not established separate management controls to ensure the accuracy of data extracted from the system and included in the consumer complaint database,” they continued.

OIG indicated that it found “several noticeable” inaccuracies in its analysis of the 254,835 complaints in the database as of June 30 of last year.

“Although the number of complaints with inaccuracies that we identified was relatively small, enhancing existing controls would help ensure that as the number and types of complaints published increase, overall reliability of the data is maintained,” OIG officials said.

Those recommendations included:

— Implement controls to separately assess the accuracy of complaint fields in the consumer complaint database.

— Formally document standards for the data entry of complaints with foreign addresses.

— Implement the planned address verification tool to enhance the accuracy of consumer-provided location information in the consumer complaint database

— Develop approaches for monitoring company closing responses to ensure consistency with the response definition.

— Verify the effectiveness of the recent system change to ensure that untimely company closing responses, regardless of investigation status, are published.

— Formally clarify the time limit for consumers to dispute company closing responses.

— Verify that the recent system change ensures that consumers can dispute untimely company closing responses within a defined time frame and consumer dispute data are properly published in the consumer complaint database.

— Develop and implement a policy that states when the public should be notified of consumer complaint database update failures and includes procedures for the notification process.

The OIG audit also found two other issues with the CFPB’s department that monitors responses associated with complaints. Officials noted the Office of Consumer Response does not review all company closing responses, including verifying whether the company-selected response is consistent with the definition and consistently publish untimely company closing responses in the consumer complaint database.

In addition, we found that Office of Consumer Response allows 60 days for consumers to dispute company responses, rather than 30 days as stated in Consumer Response publications,” officials said.

“Further, consumers are not consistently offered the opportunity to dispute untimely company responses,” they continued.

“Finally, although the consumer complaint database website asserts that complaint data are refreshed daily, we found that Consumer Response did not consistently notify the public when the database was not updated,” OIG officials went on to say. “Consumer Response has resolved the causes for the majority of the daily update failures that we observed, but it has not established procedures to inform the public when complaint data are incomplete or outdated.”

The entire 45-page document titled, "Opportunities Exist to Enhance Management Controls Over the CFPB’s Consumer Complaint Database," can be downloaded here.