Older Americans, service members wait longer on financial complaints

Older Americans used to have a slight edge when it came to getting a timely reply after filing a financial complaint. That edge is gone. Service members, a group that includes active duty, reserve, and veteran personnel, have never caught up to the general public. A study examining more than 1.27 million complaints filed with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau between 2014 and 2022 found that even as companies got better overall at meeting response deadlines, two of the country’s most financially vulnerable populations kept landing on the wrong side of the trend line.

Context makes those gaps hard to brush off. In 2024, older victims reported $4.9 billion in losses to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center alone. The Federal Trade Commission estimates the true cost of fraud against older adults could run anywhere from $10.1 billion to $81.5 billion once underreporting is factored in. Service members face their own pressures, from the difficulties of transitioning out of military life to dealing with unfamiliar lending environments. When these groups turn to the government’s official complaint system for help, the last thing anyone would expect is that they’d be less likely to get a timely answer.

That’s exactly what researchers found.

CFPB operates a centralized system where consumers can file complaints about financial products like mortgages, debt collection, and banking services. Once a complaint is submitted, the bureau forwards it to the company in question, which is expected to respond within set deadlines, generally 15 calendar days or up to 60 if the company marks the case as still in progress. CFPB then records whether the company met that window with a simple yes-or-no flag. This measures whether the deadline was met, not how long the response actually took or whether the consumer got a favorable outcome.

Researchers Yidan Sun, Daiqi He, and Mayank Kejriwal analyzed 1,273,653 complaints from the CFPB’s public database. Each record included the type of financial product involved, the consumer’s ZIP code, and two optional tags that filers could select: “older American” (age 62 and up) and “service member.” Complaints without either tag were grouped as the general population, which made up about 89.8% of the sample. Models adjusted for state, product type, year, and a measure of neighborhood disadvantage that ranks communities based on income, education, and other socioeconomic conditions tied to each ZIP code.

For the general public, the predicted likelihood of getting a timely company response climbed from 97.7% in 2014 to 99.4% in 2022. Service members saw improvement too, rising from 96.9% to 99.1%. But they never matched the general population.

The gap peaked at 1.8 percentage points in 2016 and narrowed to 0.3 points by 2022. That 0.3-point gap might sound trivial. It isn’t. Among the 26,533 service-member complaints filed in 2022, it translates to roughly 80 additional late responses compared to what would be expected if service members were treated the same as everyone else.

Older Americans took an even more unusual path. In 2014, they actually held a slight edge: their predicted probability of a timely response was 98.2%, half a percentage point higher than the general public’s 97.7%. That advantage disappeared in 2016, and by 2017 it had flipped into a clear disadvantage. By 2022, their predicted probability sat at 98.8%, a full 0.6 points below the general population and 0.3 points below service members. Applied to the 10,788 older-adult complaints filed in 2022, that gap works out to an estimated 65 additional late responses.

Neighborhood wealth played a role, independent of age or military status. Consumers in less affluent areas were consistently less likely to receive a timely response, even after accounting for product type, year, and state. The largest gaps showed up among older adults, with state-by-state maps revealing uneven disparities, especially in some western and northern states.

For the general population specifically, researchers estimated the gap between advantaged and disadvantaged neighborhoods translated to roughly 211 fewer timely responses out of 252,609 complaints filed from high-disadvantage areas across included states over the full study period.

Study authors are careful to note in their paper that a late response isn’t proof of discrimination. Complaints involving older adults and service members may simply be harder to resolve. Fraud-related cases, for instance, can trigger additional verification steps. Companies dealing with complaints from high-poverty areas may face similar documentation hurdles. Researchers explicitly interpret these patterns as “descriptive differences in process timeliness, not evidence of discriminatory intent.”

Still, the trend for older Americans is hard to ignore. A group that started the study period with a modest advantage ended it at a clear disadvantage, while overall timeliness was improving for everyone else. The data shows the pattern, but it can’t say why, whether it reflects case difficulty, documentation demands, firm priorities, or something else entirely. For seniors losing billions to fraud and service members facing unique financial pressures, even small gaps in responsiveness matter.