A TCPA Compliance Checklist for Outbound Calling Teams

Most TCPA problems aren't caused by teams deciding to ignore the rules. They're caused by a step quietly falling out of the process — a list that didn't get re-scrubbed, an opt-out that only went into one system, a campaign that ran an hour late into a western time zone. This is the checklist that catches those.

Before you build the list

• Know where every number came from. Purchased lists, scraped data and "partner" leads are where most consent problems originate. If you can't say how a number entered your database, you can't defend calling it.
• Know what consent you actually hold. Prior express consent and prior express written consent are different things covering different call types. We break that down in consent types explained.
• Check how old the consent is. Old consent carries reassignment risk — the number may belong to somebody else now.

Before every campaign

• Scrub against the federal DNC registry. Every time, not once when the list was built. Registrations are added constantly and never expire.
• Scrub against applicable state registries. Several states maintain their own. See which states run their own list.
• Check your internal do-not-call list. Anyone who has asked you directly to stop must be suppressed regardless of what any registry says.
• Screen for litigators and honeypots. These are numbers where a single call is disproportionately likely to become a claim.
• Keep the report. A scrub you can't evidence is worth very little when someone asks you to prove it.

While the campaign runs

• Respect calling hours in the recipient's time zone. Federal rules allow 8am to 9pm local to the called party — which is the trap, because your dialer runs on your clock, not theirs. Some states are stricter.
• Identify yourself properly. Callers are generally required to state who is calling and on whose behalf, and to provide a number that can be called back.
• Honour opt-outs immediately and everywhere. An opt-out captured by one agent in one system is not an opt-out if the number still sits live in three others.
• Watch your answer rates for labelling. If carriers start tagging your numbers as spam, that's a separate problem from the TCPA but it will quietly destroy the campaign.

After the campaign

• Fold new opt-outs back into the suppression list before the next campaign runs, not at some later tidy-up.
• Archive the scrub reports and call records with the campaign, so the evidence stays attached to the thing it evidences.
• Review anything that generated a complaint. Complaints are the cheapest possible warning that something upstream is broken.

The part teams skip

If you only take one thing from this list: re-scrub before every campaign, not once per list. The single most common failure we see is a list that was genuinely clean when it was built, reused six months later on the assumption that clean is a permanent state. It isn't. We covered the timing question in how often to re-scrub.

Carrier Fence covers the scrubbing steps in one pass — DNC, litigator and honeypot checks on an uploaded file, with a report you can archive. New accounts get 500 free coins.

General information, not legal advice. Your obligations depend on what you sell, who you call, and where they live.