DMA Hails Do-Not-Call Cleanup Plan

The Direct Marketing Association today praised the Federal Trade Commission’s plan to improve the accuracy of its Do-Not-Mail Registry.

Working through a contractor, the FTC will now match all disconnects in the Registry against the National Directory Assistance database, and will remove them only when there is a “higher degree of confidence that the telephone number has been disconnected and reassigned to a new customer,” the FTC said.

“Since the Do-Not-Call Registry was first implemented in 2003, DMA has been aware that thousands, if not millions, of phone numbers were on the registry erroneously,” said CEO John A. Greco, in a statement. “These numbers belonged to businesses, which are exempt from the Registry, individuals whose phone numbers had been reassigned due to relocation, or were fax numbers wrongly placed on the Registry.”

The FTC described the improvements on Friday in a report to Congress. The plan is based, in part, on comments solicited from industry groups following passage of the Do Not Call Improvement Act of 2007 (DNCIA).

Greco noted that the DMA “worked closely with Congress, particularly with Sens. Inouye, Dorgan and Pryor and Representatives Dingell and Rush, on the DNCIA that called for this report and with the FTC to correct the errors in the Registry, and we are pleased to see these efforts come to fruition through the FTC’s action.”