Weiser’s record: 27,000 complaints. 17 settlements.

By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice

When a Coloradan files a consumer complaint with the attorney general’s office — a contractor who vanished with a deposit, a lender charging illegal interest, a landlord who pocketed a security deposit without cause — the office receives it, logs it and adds it to a database. The complaint may help build a future case. It informs trend reports. For the person who filed it, that is usually where it ends.

Coloradans filed a record 26,993 complaints with Attorney General Phil Weiser’s Consumer Protection Section last fiscal year. That’s nearly three times the number filed when Weiser took office in 2019. His March 2026 press release describes the growth as “over 200 percent.” His office’s own annual figures put the actual increase at 175 percent.

The mandatory performance data his office files with the state legislature each year tells the enforcement story. In fiscal year 2025, the Consumer Protection Section obtained 17 settlements or judgments against businesses. Its own target was 40. That is a 57 percent miss — the lowest settlement total the SMART Act filings show in at least three years.

27,000 in. 17 out.

The office reports two consumer protection metrics to the legislature each year. They consist of the number of investigations opened and how many enforcement actions were completed. 

On the investigation side, the numbers held. There were 100 opened in fiscal year 2023, 101 in 2024, and 102 in 2025. The office raised its own investigations target from 65 to 100 in fiscal year 2025 and cleared it by two.

In fiscal year 2023 the office opened 100 investigations and closed 28 settlements. In 2024: 101 and 40. In 2025: 102 and 17.

Seventeen settlements against 26,993 complaints means one enforcement outcome for every 1,588 complaints received. In fiscal year 2023, the ratio was 1 in 728. The volume is climbing. The results are not.

At the January 20 oversight hearing before the Joint Judiciary Committee, Weiser addressed the gap directly. “Consumer complaints as you note are up, creating challenges for us,” he said. “We can’t take on every case, including many righteous cases.”

Then he said, “It’s unfortunately just a judgment call I have to keep making as we see different harms. How do we constantly triage what is a limited portfolio of cases vis à vis all the harms that are out there?”

At the midpoint of the current fiscal year, the office had reached 20 settlements — on pace for 40 by June 30. The second half remains to be seen.

Stronger laws. Same ceiling.

Weiser’s legislative record on consumer protection is real. 

In 2019, HB19-1289 was the first major overhaul of the Colorado Consumer Protection Act in decades. At the time, Colorado ranked 48th in the nation in consumer protection law strength, per the National Consumer Law Center. 

The new law expanded the intent standard to cover reckless conduct, added a catch-all provision and raised the per-violation penalty from $2,000 to $20,000. Then came a rewrite of the state antitrust law, the Colorado Privacy Act, junk fee protections, lemon law reforms, and restrictions on auto-renewing subscriptions.

The tools got stronger. The enforcement output in fiscal year 2025 was the lowest in at least three years.

The office’s own website offers the explanation: “Historically, the department has been unable to address every complaint through enforcement due to limited resources or other constraints.”

That sentence appears on coag.gov directly beneath the heading “Consumer Mediation Program.”

The program built with bubblegum and duct tape

In March 2022 the office launched what Weiser described to a reporter as a program built “with bubblegum and duct tape.” Student interns and a postgraduate fellow contacted businesses flagged by consumer complaints, told them complaints had come in and asked if they were willing to resolve them informally. No subpoenas. No investigative authority. A phone call and a question.

The pilot of the Consumer Mediation Program ran one year. The office attempted 218 mediations. Sixty-five were resolved. Consumers got back more than $127,000. The office declared it a success, made the program permanent and hired one full-time mediator.

That was March 2023. 

In the three years since, the office has received roughly 72,000 consumer complaints. It has published nothing on how the permanent program is performing — no annual figures, no press release, no legislative report. 

The SMART Government Act requires the Department of Law to file more than 30 performance metrics with the state legislature each year. The Consumer Mediation Program is tracked by none of them.

At the January 20 hearing Weiser offered the only public figure for the program’s three-year record: “We’ve gotten meaningful relief, hundreds of thousands of dollars every year through that mechanism.”

The pilot year returned $127,000. There has been no record published since to confirm his claim. 

Representative Clifford pressed the staffing question at the same hearing. “Your consumer protection workload surge…How are you managing your FTE and the staffing to do that? That’s a massive increase.”

Weiser discussed his triage approach and the mediation mechanism. He gave no headcount, no vacancy rate and no direct answer to whether staffing had grown alongside the complaint volume. The committee did not follow up.

What the office won’t release

On April 16, RMV filed a Colorado Open Records Act request with the Department of Law seeking the mediation program’s annual outcome statistics since its 2023 launch — complaints referred, mediations attempted, disputes resolved and dollars returned for each year.

On April 22 the office denied it. The response: “We have no public record responsive to your request number 2. See C.R.S. §§ 5-6-106(4), 6-1-111(2).”

Both statutes protect investigation records including the identities of businesses and individuals under investigation and the specific facts gathered in those cases. C.R.S. § 5-6-106(4) says the administrator “shall not make public the name or identity of a person whose acts or conduct he or she investigates…or the facts disclosed in the investigation.” C.R.S. § 6-1-111(2) covers “records of investigations or intelligence information” under the Consumer Protection Act.

A count of how many mediations the program attempted is not the name of an investigated party. A total dollar figure returned to consumers is not a fact from a specific investigation file. 

The request sought the same kind of aggregate data that the office published voluntarily in its March 2023 press release announcing the program’s permanent launch. Both statutes were in place in 2023. The office released the figures then without invoking either of them.

RMV has filed a formal challenge to the denial. A separate CORA request for Consumer Protection section staffing records remains under review.

A second metric, largely unnoticed

A second performance metric in the SMART Act filings has drawn little attention.

The Uniform Consumer Credit Code unit — which handles debt collection, lending and interest rate complaints — is required to resolve 90 percent of actionable complaints within 60 days. 

In fiscal year 2023 it hit 71 percent. In fiscal year 2024, 74.2 percent. In fiscal year 2025, 74 percent. Three consecutive years below target by 16 to 19 percentage points, while debt collection complaints rose 22 percent and became the fourth-largest category the office receives. At the midpoint of fiscal year 2026 the unit reached 90 percent — exactly on target.

The Consumer Protection Custodial Account, funded by past enforcement settlements including the Google search monopoly case, Walmart overcharging and GAP insurance refunds, held $34,461,401 as of fiscal year 2023-24 per the Department of Law’s December 2024 Joint Budget Committee document. The fund is restricted by law to future enforcement, as well as consumer education and restitution. It cannot be used for salaries or general operations. The fund held $34.4 million in the same fiscal year the office closed 17 settlements.

What Weiser says

At the January 20 hearing, no legislator raised the missed targets. Weiser didn’t either. He told the committee, “The Department of Law is working in a way that I’m deeply proud of.” 

He faces Sen. Michael Bennet in the June 30 Democratic primary, running on the RealPage rent-fixing settlements, the Kroger-Albertsons antitrust case and the 2019 legislative overhaul.

His office website describes the Consumer Mediation Program as evidence the office can “resolve more complaints and help more consumers receive satisfaction.” But no numbers have been published since its first year. 

The program’s pilot year resolved 65 disputes out of 17,941 complaints filed. For the three years since, the office says the numbers are confidential.

Editor’s note: Second in Weiser’s Record, a Rocky Mountain Voice series on the Department of Law’s performance filings. Read the first installment: The Lawsuit Machine and the Scorecard.