Complaint Information & Submission Instructions
So many of our readers have lost money, time, and experienced damages from Utah licensed professionals!
Or maybe it was an unlicensed person pretending to be a licensed professional. Either way, in Utah we have very little state supervision or regulation.
Unfortunately, our state legislature has been heavily influenced by lobbyists and donors of certain industries to pass laws that effectively eliminate needed consumer protections and consequences for those that have intentionally harmed Utah consumers.
One example is the Utah Real Estate Lobby, it is or has been the group that has donate the largest amount of funds to our legislator campaigns. If after years of receiving $5,000 or so a year from them, if you think a legislator is going to vote against their more lax regulations of real estate agents requests, think again.
I’m sad to say they would rather see their constituent voters be burned by non-disclosure of material problems in a sale, higher commissions by eliminating discount brokers, or some other damaging issue. We also see that a high number of real estate salesmen, builders & lawyers are elected to the legislature. These combined efforts wield enormous power to effectively eliminate laws and codes that could reduce their income or opportunities to take unfair advantage of real estate buyers and sellers. Many of these are foxes in the state capitol hen house and should be voted out.
We ask you to be especially careful when you hire these types of professionals as we have found an exceptionally high number of frauds and illegal behavior in these Utah Professions:
Attorneys
Auto Mechanics
Contractors (Almost any type, from asphalt, building, cement, electrical, landscaping, plumbing, etc..)
Land Surveyors
Mortgage Brokers
Real Estate Agents, Brokers & Realtors
If you have already been burned, we are so very sorry you have been through a horrible experience!
If you want to file a complaint with us please reply with documentation you have completed these steps to us at cfpau.org@gmail.com
Step 1)
Who is the contractor that signed your contract? Or if a Professional Service on their agreement you may have signed at their office?
I suggest you start by looking up their license status at https://secure.utah.gov/llv/search/index.html You would be surprised how many contractors neglect to pay their fees if they are licensed to keep their licenses, and those that claim to be licensed are not. A popular trick is they say they are working under someone else’s license when they are asked for their license number. If they sign the contract, they better be legally licensed to do so, or the contract may be invalid. And you may be able to get all your money back after the poor quality work was done.
Step 2)
If you refuse to pay a licensed contractor they may file a “mechanic’s lien”. If your contract or agreement is under $10,000, our general first recommendation is to take them to small claims court. Especially if you can show they did not perform as agreed. If they did not perform as agreed, they are not entitled to file a mechanics lien. If a judge would decide the same, they may order that they remove that mechanic’s lien. I’m not a lawyer and can’t give you legal advice, but that is what I would do first to stop that issue. If you must pay another professional to fix the job they worked on add it to the small claims complaint. Also, deduct from what you have paid them already the cost of fixing their failed work and add that to the small claim.
Step 3)
File a formal complaint with the Utah Division of Occupational & Professional Licensing known as DOPL. or their appropriate professional industry organization. I tried to complain to DOPL about an unlicensed land surveyor (he represented to me he was licensed and he owned a large land survey & engineering firm, while he trespassed on my land and placed survey flags on it to represent phony boundaries), he had not been licensed for over a year. He worked for neighbors to intentionally defraud me out of some of my property with a phony survey to enrich them.
All DOPL would do is give him a ticket between $50 and $1,000 and then quickly within a week of my complaint they let him pay fees and gave him a new land surveyors license, and represented on their website that he was licensed and in good standing with them, thus fooling the public NOT disclosing he had been recently cited for not having a license and that he had a current fraud complaint. DOPL refused to investigate the fraud, even though I could show them a phony survey that he did where he actually made up another parcel that did not exist in my area. My county surveyor provided the correct survey map to show that this surveyor was doing phony work but DOPL and his professional land surveyor organization refused to review the proof of the fraud and said I must settle it in civil court.
That said, you should still do the right thing and file a complaint with them at https://dopl.utah.gov/complaint/index.html It will help your case in court and provide helpful documentation to us to follow up with a bad review/opinion searchable under their name and company name on Google.
Please provide us a copy of your Complaint Form to the Utah Division of Consumer Protection (DOPL) and their decision letter/email if you file a complaint with us.
Step 4)
Contact the Better Business Bureau (BBB). You may need to be persistent with them but they will eventually follow through. They are valuable because they will contact your Contractor or Professional and ask for their explanation and usually provide a poor grade. I have worked recently with Tiffany Clegg, Business & Consumer Relations e-mail tclegg@mw.bbb.org Bette
Step 5)
Next look them up on Angie’s List and file a complaint there. Businesses pay a lot of money to be listed there and bad reviews really hurt them there and often prevent them from acquiring new business. They are more likely to settle with you to resolve your complaints if they see you will follow through with bad reviews and complaints that hurt their state licensing and standing online.
Another place often used for contractors is Home Advisor you can copy and paste your BBB complaint here also.
Google (Add a rating or review that will be seen on Google Maps)
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- On your computer, open Google Maps and make sure you’re signed in.
- Search for a place.
- On the left, scroll down and click Write a review.
- In the window that appears, click the stars to score the place. You can also write a review.
Place your complaint also at other places to put your reviews are YELP, Consumer Affairs, and Trust Pilot.
Bad reviews like these do add up and cost businesses money. They often stay for years only and savvy consumers that look them up before hiring them are warned. I always search for anyone before working with them now. It is especially important that we warn our fellow Utahans about both good & bad professionals and businesses.
If you can’t get satisfaction through all these efforts & places, please provide documentation of all these steps, and “Consumer Financial Protection Advocacy Utah” may contact the company or individual about the issue and then post complaints on Google and in social media if all these other efforts to resolve them fail. We will call as much attention to them as we can to try to resolve your issue.
We have found Utah to still be the “Wild Wild West” in many respects when comes to protecting consumers, especially women.
Our laws and professional codes are about 50 years behind the times and other states consumer protection efforts! This is one reason Utah is known as the fraud capital of America as our Attorney General states on his website. Like the Real Estate Lobby example I gave that pays the Legislators about $5,000 each a year to NOT write or pass consumer laws that would protect Utahans from bad Realtors. Theaw legislators have passed tricky laws to keep the agents commissions high and prevent competition from discount real estate brokers. At over $10,000 average sales commissions for just one home sale, false information, lack of disclosure of major home problems run rampant. They even limit the time a homeowner can complain which is often long before they discover the major issue.
As long as these professional or industry lobbies can make large campaign contributions to influence the legislature and others like our state Attorney General to look the other way when they are supposed to be looking out for us, we are going to experience an overabundance of these frauds!
Fortunately, with the Internet, the power is now placed back into the hands of consumers. A consumer can write an honest review and make a complaint giving their opinion about the experience they have had with a company, contractor or other organization or professional without fear of a defamation claim. So don’t worry if Earthscapes put in clauses in their contract to try to prevent you from speaking out about their bad service or any defamation claims:
“The Consumer Review Fairness Act (CRFA) protects people’s ability to share their honest opinions about a business’s products, services, or conduct, in any forum, including social media.Contracts that prohibit honest reviews, or threaten legal action over them, harm people who rely on reviews when making their purchase decisions. But another group is also harmed when others try to squelch honest negative reviews: businesses that work hard to earn positive reviews.
The Consumer Review Fairness Act of 2016 was passed in response to reports that some businesses try to prevent people from giving honest reviews about products or services they received. Some companies put contract provisions in place, including in their online terms and conditions, that allowed them to sue or penalize consumers for posting negative reviews.”Consumers Financial Protection Advocacy Utah is a non-profit and is run by community volunteers that care about protecting Utah consumers from fraud and advocate for them.
If we all would look up the reviews of a person or company before we hire them, and if others would take the time to provide both good and bad reviews of the services we employ, we could put a lot of bad people out of business, while the helping the good ones succeed.
