June 1, 2006 | Read Time: 1 minute
An effort by two Maryland charities to challenge federal telemarketing restrictions has ended with the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to review the nonprofit groups’ complaints.
Nonprofit groups are exempt from many of the restrictions and disclosure requirements that the Federal Trade Commission has placed on telemarketers over the past several years.
In 2003, however, the commission told commercial telemarketing firms working on behalf of charities to follow some of the restrictions, such as the prohibitions against placing calls before 8 a.m. or after 9 p.m. or against using recorded messages.
In addition, so-called abandoned calls, when a telemarketing representative fails to come on the line within two seconds, were also prohibited.
And for-profit callers hired by nonprofit groups were also required to promptly state that they were soliciting charitable donations.
The National Federation of the Blind, in Baltimore, and Special Olympics Maryland, in Linthicum — both of which use commercial telemarketers for fund raising — said that such restrictions on the companies they hired to represent their organizations violated their Constitutional free-speech rights.
The charities had previously argued their case in a U.S. District Court and the U.S. Court of Appeals, but both said the federal agency was allowed to place restrictions on companies that solicit on behalf of nonprofit organizations.
By refusing to review the case, the Supreme Court allowed the lower-court rulings to stay in place.
In a legal filing describing its position, the Federal Trade Commission described the restrictions on solicitors for charities as “modest limitations on telemarketing calls in order to protect residential privacy.”
In addition, it said that “for-profit solicitors are more likely to engage in abusive or coercive telemarketing behavior because their compensation depends on the level of contributions they solicit.”
