Optimism Shines Bright for NCBA

Chip Stacy
Hood & Stacy P.A.

My recent election as President-Elect of the National Creditors Bar Association (NCBA) is fortunate timing for me as the hard work of the organization has given rise to a great amount of optimism for 2021. Led by Liz Terry and Mark Groves, NCBA successfully hosted a live executive experience with over one hundred participants in Scottsdale, Arizona. The feedback from our attendees has been overwhelmingly positive. Strong leadership and detailed planning paid off in successfully having a live conference that many deemed impossible. As a result, similar associations to NCBA are now moving ahead with live conferences in early 2021.

The very next week, NCBA received very good news from the CFPB that the meaningful attorney involvement safe harbor provision would be excluded from its debt collection rules. This is another positive NCBA development that was a result of strong leadership, detailed planning and a lot of hard work by our volunteers and lobbying group, Rich Feuer Anderson. The exclusion of this provision in the CFPB rules provides significant value to our entire membership and helps preserve the independence of the practice of law from federal government regulation.

As a result of the many donations from member firms to our legislative fund, Rich Feuer Anderson led our efforts in ensuring that proposed federal legislation that could have crippled our industry did not become law. Many volunteers worked tirelessly in these efforts as well, including members of Congress, and most notably, Congressman Alex Mooney who has been a reliable supporter of NCBA.

As many of you know, COVID-19 has had a profound effect on our membership and NCBA. NCBA was unable to host both its Spring and Fall Conferences, which created a budget short fall. Once again led by Liz Terry and Mark Groves, our organization not only cut expenses to offset revenue losses, but also expanded its membership services. NCBA quickly learned of a great demand for education of our members on COVID related issues, such as the Paycheck Protection Program, the CARES Act and best practices for employees during COVID. Our organization delivered with a record number of educational programs having historic attendance levels and at very low costs to the members.

Finally, great news on the efficacy and expected soon approval of a COVID vaccine provides us much hope that in 2021, NCBA can return to normalcy with our conferences and other areas of our industry while maintaining the new strengths and efficiencies we were forced to undertake during this pandemic. To my good luck, I start my year of learning from Liz Terry and Mark Groves at a time that the best of both worlds will likely collide for NCBA. In 2021, there is much optimism that NCBA will be able to return to the normalcy of operations while maintaining all of its new strengths developed in the past nine months. The future is bright and I am glad to be a part of it!