On June 2, NSSTA and the National Consumers League attached a number to the Maryland reforms that’s hard to look away from: approved factoring petitions in the state fell from roughly 1,800 a year to six. Not six hundred. Six. Any time a statistic is that dramatic, it’s worth asking what actually produced it, because the wrong lesson is as easy to draw as the right one.

Maryland’s package did four things: it required hearings in the seller’s home venue, scripted the questions a judge must ask, limited solicitation, and protected the personal identification information (PII) of recipients aging out of minor status. It’s tempting to credit the courtroom reforms, because they’re visible and satisfying — forum shopping dies when you can’t shop a case into a rubber-stamp county, and a mandatory script means no judge can rubber-stamp on autopilot. Those reforms matter. But they operate at the very end of the pipeline, once an annuitant has already been found, pitched, and walked to the courthouse. They screen out bad transactions. They don’t stop the bad transactions from being generated in the first place.

The reform doing the quiet, upstream work is the confidentiality piece. A collapse from 1,800 to six isn’t the sound of a lot of deals being denied at a hearing — it’s the sound of deals never being initiated, because the firms that live on scraped records lost their supply of names. That’s the distinction we’d urge every other state to sit with. Virginia, D.C., North Carolina, and South Carolina have already adopted parts of the model; the ones that copy only the courtroom reforms will get a cleaner hearing and a modest dip in bad deals, while the ones that also protect the records will get Maryland’s six. The full package is the right goal, and we’d take any piece of it in a state that has none. But if a legislature has the appetite for exactly one reform this session, the numbers point straight at the least glamorous item on the list.



Protect the PII first.