Amendments to Pennsylvania's Telemarketer Registration Act Effective Today

Today, December 3, 2019, the amendments to Pennsylvania's Telemarketer Registration Act go into effect. Act 73 of 2019 amends the 1996 Act by "further providing for definitions, for unlawful acts and penalties, for blocking of caller identification and other telemarketing screening products or services prohibited and for unwanted telephone solicitation calls prohibited".

The amendments target 4 key areas of the law:

1 - The duration of the listing on the "do-not-call" list is now permanent as long as the subscriber holds the number or "until the subscriber requests to have the telephone number removed from the list" (§ 5.2(c)). According to comments made by the bill's sponsor, Rep. Lori Mizgorski, on February 20, this matches the federal do-not-call law.

2 - Telephone solicitation calls should no longer occur on legal holidays (§ 5(a)(10)).

3 - "Robocall" is now defined (§ 2) and robocalls are now required to provide information at the beginning of the call on how to opt out of calls from that business (§ 5.2(j)(1)).

4 - "Business telephone subscriber" is now defined (§ 2) and businesses now have the ability to add their numbers to do-not-call lists. As mentioned by Rep. Frank A. Farry on February 19, this portion of the amendment was added based on requests from businesses located in the Representative's community.

These acts are found in the unofficial statutes, including Purdon's Pennsylvania Statutes and the unofficial online version from Westlaw, at 73 P.S. 2241 et seq.

A summary of this law was listed in the "Capitol Report" found in the print supplement to The Legal Intelligencer, the Pennsylvania Law Weekly, on October 15 (42 PLW 977).