All terms

Recall

Recall — A recall is a creditor's withdrawal of a placed account from the collections firm, ending the firm's authority to work it and triggering return of files, cessation of contact, and reconciliation of any fees earned.

Recall has no definition in the FDCPA, Regulation F, or any CFPB or interagency guidance located for this glossary; it is entirely a creature of the placement agreement, and practitioners should treat it as such. Contractually it is worth distinguishing recall for cause (a compliance event, a dispute, a bankruptcy or deceased notice, an attorney representation) from routine recall at the end of a placement term, because the fee treatment and the required wind-down steps usually differ. Operationally, an unclean recall is a compliance hazard: accounts that remain live in a dialer or letter stream after recall generate contacts the firm has no authority to make, and the termination stage of the interagency third-party life cycle expects banks to manage exactly this transition.

See also

• PlacementA placement is the assignment of an account or a batch of accounts by a creditor or debt owner to a collections firm or agency for collection, under terms set by a placement agreement, without transferring ownership.
• Cease and desistA cease and desist is a consumer's written notice that they refuse to pay the debt or want the collector to stop contacting them, after which the collector must stop communicating about that debt except to acknowledge termination of efforts or to state that a specified remedy may be or will be invoked.
• TPRMTPRM, or third-party risk management, is the bank discipline of identifying and managing the risks arising from business arrangements with outside parties — including the law firms and agencies to which it places collections work — across the full life cycle of the relationship.
• Disposition codeA disposition code is the standardized value a collector or system writes to an account after a contact attempt, recording the outcome — right-party contact, wrong number, no answer, refusal, promise to pay, dispute, attorney representation — and driving the next scheduled action.

Where this appears

• Migrating a collections firm to a new case management system
• Rights Radar — detecting when a consumer invokes a right

This is an informational reference, not legal advice, and using it creates no attorney-client relationship. Limitations periods turn on facts this page cannot know — which state's law governs, the contract type, when the claim accrued, and whether anything tolled or revived it. Confirm against the primary source and your own counsel before acting.