When a bank wrongly charges fees, a debt collector harasses someone over a disputed bill, or a mortgage servicer fails to apply payments correctly, Americans have a formal recourse: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Filing a complaint with the CFPB is not like venting on Yelp. Companies are legally required to respond within a defined window, typically 15 days. That legal muscle makes the CFPB fundamentally different from most consumer redress channels.
"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 Daniel J. Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the U SC Viterbi School of Engineering , who co-authored the study published in PNAS Nexus . "That's why we didn't consider things like response versus non-response; they have to respond. The real question is, how much time did they take?"
What his team found, after analyzing more than 1.27 million complaints filed between 2014 and 2022, is that response rates are high across the board — above 98% for all groups. But beneath those encouraging numbers is a consistent pattern: older Americans and service members receive slower responses than the general population, and the gap has widened over time.
The Numbers Behind the Disparity
Service-members, including active duty, reserve, and veterans, received slower responses than the general population in every single year of the study. The gap peaked at 1.8 percentage points in 2016 before narrowing, settling at 0.3 points by 2022.
The trajectory for older Americans is more alarming. In 2014, seniors were actually doing slightly better than the general population. By 2017, that advantage had evaporated, and by 2022 older adults were faring the worst of all three groups.
"The trend is going in the wrong direction," Kejriwal said. "With older Americans doing worse now than they were before, even though everyone is overall doing better, their improvement is a lot less than the general population's. So the disparity has increased."
Living in a poor neighborhood compounded the problem further. Elderly residents of economically disadvantaged zip codes faced the widest gaps in the entire dataset.
Why the Numbers Likely Understate the Problem
The figures are already troubling on their own, but Kejriwal argues they likely represent a lower bound of the problem. The people captured in the CFPB data are already those who knew the system existed, believed it might help, and were able to navigate a formal complaint process.
That filtering effect matters. Technological barriers, complex financial situations, and low awareness of complaint channels all reduce how often vulnerable people file in the first place—meaning the dataset excludes many of those most at risk. Among those who do file, complaints may also be harder to process, further contributing to delays.
"A homeless person on the street, if they've been defrauded, they're not going to be submitting to the CFPB," Kejriwal said. "There are tens of thousands of people who are likely not getting the help they need."
A System With Structural Blind Spots
The CFPB, conceived in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, remains the primary federal mechanism for holding financial companies accountable to consumers. But for the populations the study examined, its effectiveness depends on complaints being filed and processed well — two things that are increasingly difficult for the people who need it most.
Case complexity is one driving factor. Older Americans are more likely to file complaints involving medical debt, foreclosure, and fraud — issues that require more documentation, more back-and-forth, and more time to resolve. When the volume of complex cases grows faster than the resources available to handle them, timeliness suffers disproportionately for the groups generating those cases.
Knowledge gaps compound the issue. Kejriwal believes many complaints filed by elderly and low-income consumers may lack the information companies need to act quickly, not out of bad faith, but because navigating a federal complaint system is genuinely hard.
"The CFPB can only do what it gets. Even the company, if they are getting a complaint that is not properly worded, that doesn't contain enough information, there's not that much they can do either," Kejriwal said. "If we really wanted to reduce that number to zero, some kind of special service that allows older people or veterans to file better complaints, I think these disparities would go away."
