The Federal Trade Commission has tightened the process for removing disconnected or reassigned numbers from the National Do-Not-Call 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.

The commission will also try to improve the accuracy of cell phone registrations and make sure that numbers are not entered without permission.

The changes were made in response to comments submitted by the Direct Marketing Association and other sources regarding the Do Not Call Improvement Act of 2007. The FTC summarized them in a report to Congress on Friday.

For example, the DMA had argued that disconnected names should be removed more quickly from the Registry.

At the FTC’s behest, the DMA submitted a sample list of 20,000 Registry numbers that had been disconnected or reassigned based on whether their names had changed and found that “16% would have been scrubbed in error.”

Based on these results, the DMA’s contractor refined its scrubbing process and reanalyzed the 20,000 numbers. It determined that 8,374 should be treated as active registrations, the FTC continued.

“After reviewing the results from the refined scrubbing process, the primary contractor in charge of the National Registry selected DMA’s contractor as the subcontractor for overseeing the Registry purging process,” the FTC stated.

Critics were also worried that consumers could be registered without their consent. In response, the FTC now requires that consumers “call from the number they want to register or provide a verification e-mail address if registering online.”

In addition, the FTC limited the number of registrations that can be made from a single e-mail address.

Meanwhile, the subcontractor determined that roughly 5% of the land-line numbers now on the Registry are invalid and should be removed.
It will conduct regular matches against the NDA to identify disconnected numbers.

The NDA contains data from over 2,600 telephone companies, representing almost all of the land lines in the U.S., the FTC said. Phone companies are required to update their directory assistance data within a short period, the commission added. Up to two million listings are received daily.

“A disconnect order along is not sufficient to trigger an analysis because, until the number is reconnected, conformation that the number has been turned over to a new party is not possible,” the FTC noted.

The subcontractor will check the street address if the number was listed in the NDA database. The number will not be considered a reassign if it is has been reconnected to the same address.

This will eliminate “new connects that are the result of billing issues or of seasonal disconnects that are reconnected later to the same party,” the FTC contended. And it will flag new connects caused by a phone company account being transferred from one household member to another.

In another step, the subcontractor will check the last name on the account against all names associated with the number going back to 2002. This will eliminate households that have kept their phone numbers despite making a local move.

Some commenters suggested that “only the line subscriber or person who is billed for the telephone line be allowed to register that number in the National Registry, but “the commission determined that this approach was not realistic,” the FTC.

The commission argued that “the privacy rights of all are affected by unwanted telemarketing calls” in homes with shared phones.

The subcontractor will also check the last name on the account against all prior last names associated with the number going back to 2002.

The subcontractor is also working with “the wireless telecommunication carriers in an effort to obtain from them cell phone connection data,” the commission said.

Wireless carriers are not required to submit disconnect data to the NDA, but consumers are increasingly able to keep their cell numbers when they change carriers. The FTC believes this will reduce the number of reassignments.

The American Teleservices Association also commented on the bill, which took effect in February.

The Do-Not-Call Registry had 168 million numbers on it as of July 31, the FTC reported.