The FCC Wants to Grade Carriers on Robocalls, But We Asked It to Grade the Misses Too.

The FCC's proposed Robocall Mitigation Scorecard would grade phone carriers on how well they stop illegal robocalls. Which is a good idea. But, only if the grade also counts the legal calls they block by mistake.

On September 22, 2026, Henson Legal filed comments in CG Docket 26-239, the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau's request for comment on a Robocall Mitigation Scorecard.

The Bureau is upfront that the Scorecard is an incentive tool. It's meant to "encourage providers" and "incorporate marketplace incentives." A carrier stuck in a low tier will feel commercial pressure to move up. That's the mechanism, and it's a good one. It also means the Scorecard won't just describe what carriers do. It will steer it.

Here's the part the record in these dockets usually leaves out: the legitimate caller. Carriers, analytics vendors, and consumer advocates build the record. The business whose lawful call gets blocked even with proper consent is rarely in the room. And it's the party the Scorecard's incentives will hit hardest.

This is a classic "what gets measured gets managed" scenario. If the number that gets rewarded is "illegal calls blocked," and nobody sees what it costs when legitimate calls are blocked, a rational provider blocks more. Blocking is cheap and fast. Checking whether a call was actually illegal is slow and expensive. The provider that blocks first improves its grade. The provider that investigates first gets no credit.

And the businesses on the receiving end aren't fraudsters. They're the pharmacy, the school, the insurance agent returning a quote the consumer asked for, the lender confirming an application.

This already happens upstream. One consumer complaint reaches an originating provider. An acceptable-use clock starts (often 48 hours). The caller's account is suspended before anyone checks whether the traffic was consented to, scrubbed against do-not-call lists, and lawfully placed. No neutral review. No appeal. For a small business, losing the calling channel is often fatal.

YIKES.

The obvious pushback: false positives are hard to measure. Most consumers never know a wanted call was blocked, so they never complain. That's exactly why we asked the Bureau not to rely on provider self-reporting, and to look at the caller side instead: dispute volume, redress data, and third-party analytics on known-legitimate traffic. (A quiet complaint log isn't proof of accuracy. It's a measurement gap.)

So we asked the Bureau for five fixes:

1. Make erroneous blocking of legitimate calls a co-equal, prominently displayed metric, weighted at least equally with blocking volume. No provider should earn a top grade by over-blocking.
2. Score whether providers give legitimate callers real notice of blocking and mislabeling, a staffed point of contact, a defined resolution timeline, and a correction pathway that actually restores wrongly blocked traffic.
3. Don't treat unadjudicated consumer complaints as proof that a provider failed or a caller broke the law, and don't score on enforcement actions still on appeal. Complaints measure annoyance, not illegality.
4. Don't bury the tradeoff inside one composite grade. Two providers can both earn an "A." One gets there by blocking accurately. The other gets there by blocking aggressively and giving callers no way to dispute it. To a consumer, they look identical.
5. Take the Bureau's own principle that the Scorecard should not "inherently disadvantage any particular provider" and extend it to the callers those providers serve.

Our clients aren't asking the FCC to go easy on illegal robocalls. They want that traffic gone. Illegal calls poison the well for every business contacting a consumer for a lawful reason. Stop the illegal calls, and stop blocking the legal ones.

If you originate calls or texts, you're the party these incentives land on. Two things to do this week:

1. Confirm you can produce consent records, DNC scrub logs, and call-placement records within 48 hours. That's the window providers commonly give before suspension.
2. Find out who at your originating provider handles blocking and labeling disputes, and what their process actually is. If they don't have one, better to learn that now than mid-suspension.

Read the full comment here.