Court Opinion

ID: 9482478
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 08:51:42.677573+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:49:01.485379
License: Public Domain

KRUPANSKY, Circuit Judge,
concurring in part and dissenting in part.
The panel majority has misconceived the provisions of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (Act), 15 U.S.C. sections 1692-1692o, in particular, the narrow bona fide error defense and its application to the facts of the instant action.
Section 1692c of the Act prescribes dis-cernable limits on the time and place of a collection agency’s communication with a consumer in connection with the collection of a debt. 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(a) & (c). Section 1692c(c), which is entitled “Ceasing communication,” provides that once the debtor has notified the collection agency, in writing, to desist from further communication, “the debt collector shall not communicate further with the consumer with respect to such debt.” 15 U.S.C. § 1692c(c). If the consumer transmitted the cease and desist letter through the mail, a statutory presumption of notice attaches immediately upon the agency’s receipt of the letter. 15 U.S.C. § 1692e(c). Thus, the law imposes an absolute duty on the collector to desist from further communication with the consumer on the date that the collector received the consumer’s notice.1 A debt col*1034lector must recognize and incorporate this absolute duty into its routine debt collection practices and procedures. Thus, the collector must provide for a reasonable recipient response time to its collection letter, initial or otherwise, before mailing another collection letter.
Under the Act, a collector may avoid liability for a violation of section 1692e(c) through the bona fide error defense:
A debt collector may not be held liable in any action brought under this sub-chapter if the debt collector shows by a ;preponderance of evidence that the violation was not intentional and resulted from bona fide error notwithstanding the maintenance of procedures reasonably adapted to avoid any such error.
15 U.S.C. § 1692k(c) (emphasis added).
As the statute indicates, the bona fide error defense is an affirmative defense. The burden is on the debt collector to prove, by a preponderance of the evidence, both a lack of intent to violate the Act and the implementation of procedures designed to avoid a violation of the Act. Pipiles v. Credit Bureau of Lockport, Inc., 886 F.2d 22, 27 (2d Cir.1989). See Baker v. G.C. Services Corp., 677 F.2d 775, 779 (9th Cir.1982) (mistakes of law insufficient to insulate error). Moreover, the bona fide error defense applies only to clerical errors. Baker, 677 F.2d at 779. See McGowan v. King, 569 F.2d 845, 849-50 (5th Cir.1978) (bona fide error defense, as interpreted under the similar Truth in Lending Act, available only for clerical errors).
The facts of the instant case reflect that Transworld mailed its initial collection letter to Smith from California on January 13, 1989. That letter directed Smith to a Columbus, Ohio response address. Smith received the letter on January 17, 1989. He promptly mailed his cease and desist letter on January 24, 1989 from Dover, Ohio to the designated Columbus address supplied by Transworld. As stipulated by the parties, Transworld received the letter on or before January 25, 1989. Accordingly, pursuant to section 1692c(c), Transworld’s notification to cease collection activity became effective on the date it received the cease and desist letter, January 25, 1989, and it was required to immediately cease all collection activity on that day. Nonetheless, two days later, on January 27, 1989, Trans-world mailed another letter to Smith, which he received on January 30, 1989.
Raymond Ortiz, the office manager of Transworld’s Columbus, Ohio branch, stated in his affidavit that Transworld’s procedure requires “that notice of the cease and desist demand be called in to the Trans-world home office in California by the local Transworld office and that the demand be imputed to the computer and that no further collection effort be taken.” According to Ortiz, this procedure was followed since after he received Smith’s letter, “notice of the cease and desist was given to the home office in California.” However, this notice was ineffective and, according to Ortiz, the error arose “either from a mis-direction of the stop order in the California office, or the ‘crossing in the mail’ of the stop order and the computer generated collection letter.”
Pixie Wheeler, the vice-president of administration of Transworld Systems, Inc., confirmed by affidavit that a local office must notify the California office of a cease and desist demand by telephone immediately upon its receipt. In an effort to explain the “error,” Wheeler first noted that Transworld is a national agency which mails thousands of collection letters each day. In the affidavit, she further explained Transworld’s sophisticated, totally computerized collection program:
First, the collection request is automatically computer generated and printed at the Trans world headquarters. The date placed by the computer on the letter is about 2 days in advance of the mailing. This is because of the time involved for the letter to clear the printing, bulk stuffing, zip sorting, and mailing process to send the letter.
After the letter is printed, it is bulk folded and stuffed in an envelope with postage. The letter is then sent along with thousands of others in trays to the Shipping Department. *1035Transworld does not zip sort its own letters because they are too numerous and has contracted this work to an outside zip sort company.
This company picks letters up from Transworld in the Shipping Department about twice a day and transports the trays or “flats” to its offices where the items are placed in zip code order and organized for mass bulk mailing. Once this entire process is completed, the zip sorter transports the flats of mail to the U.S. Post Office and they are mailed in bulk.
As explained above, this entire process takes approximately 1 1/2 to 2 full days. Because of the volume of letters involved each day, there is no reasonable way to withdraw a letter which has already gone into the system.
Aff. of Trixie Wheeler, ¶ ¶ 7-12 (emphasis added).
As is apparent from the affidavit, Trans-world has designed a computerized system that automatically prints, bulk stuffs, zip sorts, and mails all collection letters. Once a debtor’s name has been entered into the computer’s memory bank, the computer program automatically generates the initial and all subsequent collection letters to those individuals whose names have been stored into the memory bank. Thus, once a name is entered into the computer memory bank, the collection cycle is activated and a collection letter to a specific recipient cannot be selectively aborted even though a cease and desist notice has been received and timely forwarded by a local branch to the main office unless the designated recipient’s name had been physically deleted from the computer memory bank before the computer’s succeeding fourteen-day collection cycle is automatically computer initiated.
However, the error in the instant action is not attributable to the fact that the name of the debtor remained in the computer program when the mailing sequence began, but rather to the fact that Ortiz, who received the cease and desist letter on January 25, either failed to immediately call the California office to stop the second letter, or, if he did call, the California office routed the stop notice to the wrong department. If he had called, or if the call had been effective, the debtor’s name could have been physically withdrawn, on January 25, from the computerized mailing sequence from which there is, otherwise, “no reasonable way to withdraw a letter which has already gone into [it].” Thus, as the panel majority correctly notes, under the facts and circumstances of this case, the district court’s determination that it was an unintentional, clerical error for Transworld to fail to retrieve the letter is not clearly erroneous.
Although the clerical error may have been unintentional, Transworld, nevertheless, had the additional burden of proving, by a preponderance of the evidence, that the second material element of section 1692k(c) had also been satisfied, namely, that its procedures were so designed and implemented as to avoid further communication with the debtor upon receipt of the desist notice, in order to successfully assert the bona fide error defense. However, Transworld’s own admissions and the procedure as designed belie compliance with the requirements of the section 1692c(c) defense.2
The second collection letter in the instant case was mailed through the routine operation of Transworld’s computerized collection system that was designed to automatically generate collection letters at fourteen-*1036day intervals during the first thirty days after initial contact by mail.3 The primary responsibility for printing, folding, and inserting collection letters into postpaid envelopes belonged to Transworld. Zip sorting of the collection letters was performed by a subcontractor. The zip sorter subcontractor bulk mailed the collection letters by depositing them with the United States post office. As is obvious from the foregoing, it is conceded that unless Trans-world took affirmative, physical action to remove the name of a given debtor from the computer program, the computer would automatically regenerate the second and subsequent collection letters in the name of that debtor every twelfth day. Once the letter was regenerated, it was automatically beyond selective aborting.
Transworld’s system itself has a physically insurmountable barrier to the absolute mandate of the statute to cease additional communication on the date that the desist notice is received. The system was so designed and implemented that its built-in lead time, which may be more than two days, renders it mechanically and physically impossible to withdraw a letter from the programmed mailing sequence unless the debtor’s name has been withdrawn from the printing cycle before the subsequent mailing cycle has commenced. Thus, during the built-in lead time, Transworld was and is admittedly unable to comply with the absolute mandate of the statute and abort a collection letter from its computerized collection program even if there has been no error or delay in the transmittal of the cease and desist letter to the main office. Transworld’s system cannot be characterized as a procedure reasonably designed to avoid violations of the Act. See, e.g., Beattie v. D.M. Collections, Inc., 754 F.Supp. 383, 389 (D.Del.1991) (agency provided staff with seminars, manual, and memorandum regarding compliance with Act; card posted at each telephone station reminding debt collectors to disclose purpose of call; failure of collector to disclose purpose of call bona fide error); Corrigan v. Central Adjustment Bureau, Inc., 494 F.Supp. 824, 825-27 (N.D.Ga.1980) (agency maintained no procedures for handling mail; collector’s failure to see cease and desist letter and subsequent call to consumer not bona fide error).
Thus, Transworld has intentionally structured and implemented a system that defies compliance with the absolute duty mandated by section 1692c(c). Since Trans-world has not and does not maintain procedures reasonably adopted to avoid mailing collection letters after having received a cease and desist letter, the bona fide error defense is not available to it and it is liable under section 1692c(c) for communicating with Smith after it had received his cease and desist letter. Thus, as a matter of law, summary judgment should not have been granted to Transworld on this issue, and, although I concur in the balance of the majority opinion, I respectfully dissent from the panel majority’s legal conclusion that Transworld’s clerical error in failing to retrieve the collection letter constituted a bona fide error under the statutory affirmative defense of section 1692k(c) of the Act.

. The statute permits the collector to further communicate with the consumer under three limited exceptions: to advise the consumer that all collection efforts have terminated; to notify the consumer that the collector may invoke a specific remedy; and to notify the consumer that the collector will invoke a specific remedy. 15 U.S.C. § 1692e(c)(l)-(3). Since Smith received a routine collection letter after the appel-*1034lee had received Smith’s cease and desist notice, these exceptions are inapplicable to this case.

. The panel majority rationalizes that Trans-world proved the second mailing was "inadvertent” through the depositions of two employees and its own five-page instruction manual provided to clients. However, the panel majority does not allude to nor does the record disclose the procedures implemented by Transworld to advert this type of error because those procedures are not, contrary to the panel majority’s statement, embodied in the five-page manual or the depositions.
For example, the five-page instruction manual is nothing more than a compendium of instructions for Transworld's customers to follow seri-atim in using Transworld’s debt collection services. It incorporates no admonition or notice to its customers, much less to its employees, that addresses either directly or indirectly the implications of the Fair Debt Collection Act.

. The first thirty days is the critical period during which cease and desist notices would generally be received by Transworld.