Opinion ID: 2816600
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Other Fairness and Policy

Text: Considerations The soundness of placing the burden on the debt collector is even more compelling when considered in the context of Congress’s concern, expressly stated in 15 U.S.C. § 1692(a), with the “invasions of individual privacy” of consumers. See Nat’l Commc’ns Ass’n, 238 F.3d at 131 (“[T]he policies underlying the statute at issue are appropriately considered by courts when allocating the burden of proof.”); Ingraham, 808 F.2d at 1079 (holding that 22 policy considerations are an appropriate factor in determining burdens of proof). While Mr. Heim may not have understood the precise details of his conversations with Green Tree, he clearly understood the subject matter to be private and sensitive—the very type of interaction the FDCPA is intended to limit. See, e.g., Tr. of Robert Heim, ECF No. 25-3, 9:14-17 (“If they were [calling] from Green Tree or whatever, [they would] ask if I would get Patty next door, I -- I wouldn’t go. I wouldn’t bother her with something like that. It’s her own business.”); id. at 13:6-9 (“I [kept] telling them, don’t call this house again for a message to go next door. I said, I have my own problems and she has hers.”). Saddling consumers with the burden to prove the absence of the debt collector’s proper purpose or reasonable belief, however, would mean that consumers like Evankavitch would endure the embarrassment of such calls to neighbors and other third parties with no means of proving a FDCPA violation unless those third parties took copious notes or recalled the conversations in detail or the debt collector offered up testimony or documentary proof of its own violation in discovery. It would also run contrary to the tenet that “all else . . . being equal, courts should avoid requiring a party to shoulder the more difficult task of proving a negative.” Nat’l Commc’ns Ass’n, 238 F.3d at 131; see also Lupyan, 761 F.3d at 322 (“The law has long recognized that such an evidentiary feat is next to impossible.”). In sum, allocating the burden to the consumer would be inconsistent with the Act’s remedial purpose and our duty to construe it broadly, see Lesher, 650 F.3d at 997, and we 23 therefore will place the burden where it belongs: on the debt collector.13