It looks like President Obama is coming back to New Mexico, and the topic of conversation:
Gov. Bill Richardson says President Barack Obama is planning to visit Albuquerque next week to hold a town hall meeting on credit card debt.
Here is the thing. There has been an awful lot of talk on this front. Yet, if you want to file a complaint against what appears to be abusive practices, the federal government makes you jump through unnecessary hoops.
You might remember that not long ago I put up a post regarding what I thought was a rather questionable practice by Bank of America:
So, the question is raised, “Why would Bank of America intentionally set a Sunday due date if making payment on this date is going to cause the consumer to be considered late?” When I spoke to the customer service representative, I was told that when I logged online to pay my bill, there was a disclaimer that it would not be processed on time. Of course, by that point in time there is absolutely no way to make a timely payment on the account – because Bank of America purposely set the due date to fall on a SUNDAY. In fact, he told me, even if I had paid the bill on Saturday, the day before it was due according to my statement, it still would not have been processed in time.
In that post I indicated that I didn’t take all of this sitting down. Instead, I spent some time researching which was the appropriate federal agency with which to file a complaint, and submitted a very detailed online complaint with the Comptroller of Currency.
What did I get for my trouble? I got an email response that said:
We handle a large volume of Emails. Since you have been assigned a case number, we request that you communicate with us through phone (800-613-6743), fax (713-336-4301), or regular mail as we do not process complaints by Email.
This is absurd. I’m not asking them to act on my behalf as much as I’m asking them to look into a situation which is no doubt impacting millions of Americans. Since I doubt I’ll receive an invitation to ask questions at the President’s town hall in New Mexico, maybe one of the Democrats reading this can ask the question I raised in that previous post.