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About a year ago, 89-year-old Verna Mae Brooks' family added her phone number to Tennessee's do-not-call list, hoping to stop the constant drumbeat of telemarketing calls each day to her Nashville home.
But a year later, Brooks still gets three or four phone calls daily.
"It's very concerning to me," said Brooks' granddaughter, Sheila Shangode Easley, 43, who helped her grandmother sign up for the state's Do-Not-Call Register. "She's 89 years old and is belabored by these calls all the time from marketers and solicitors. She feels harassed and annoyed."
Like Brooks, hundreds of Tennesseans are similarly frustrated by unwanted sales calls, even after registering their telephone numbers with the state's official do-not-call list.
According to Tennessee law, businesses must register with the state before calling residents' homes for marketing. They also must obtain monthly lists of registrants' names and numbers, and agree never to call them.
Once a name is on the list, it's there for good. Tennessee's Do-Not-Call Register contains more than 2.8 million numbers.
Since the program began in 1999, more than 3,500 complaints have been filed with the Tennessee Regulatory Authority, which oversees the program.
But few complaints have led to the punitive fines of up to $2,000 that are set out under state law, even though the state is required to punish violations "in a liberal manner in order to protect the public interest and deter similar violations," according to program rules.
Fines have tapered off
Since the Do-Not-Call Register started in 1999, the state has fined 32 companies.
In recent years, the fines have dwindled. In 2005 and 2006, only two companies, First Choice Healthcare, of San Diego, and National Forex, of Atlanta, were punished with fines for illegally calling registered Tennesseans.
State officials, however, believe the registry's operation has drastically reduced many of the problems that had for years plagued the public, and say that the fines aren't the only way of dealing with violations by companies.
"I think our enforcement has gone to great lengths to stop what was occurring before the statute," said Richard Collier, the Tennessee Regulatory Authority's chief legal counsel. "I think it stopped most of it."
"If you are still receiving the calls, then you should notify the agency. I would say it doesn't happen frequently."
The state has a team of eight investigators who look into complaints, Collier said.
Under the law, companies can avoid being penalized so long as they have a program or practice in place to prevent calling illegally, even if a call was made to a registered home, Collier said.
And many types of unsolicited calls fall under protected speech.
Take for example the political campaign calls that annoyed Ellen Tingley of Lewisburg for much of the past year. At times, she said, they were so frequent it seemed as if Bob Corker and Harold Ford had staged a virtual debate across her telephone line.
Gov. Phil Bredesen -- or at least a recording of his voice -- was also a frequent caller. It always seemed to happen around dinner time.
But Tingley won't find relief from the do-not-call registry because such political messages are constitutionally protected, state officials said.
"That's terrible," Tingley said. "If they can't take the time to call us themselves, (and) at least give me a chance to (say) what I think about them ... they shouldn't be allowed to do it."
The registry, however, should be able to help people like Hazel Fitzgerald of Nashville, who has been on the list since it began but says she's still besieged by calls, many of them from credit card companies trying to persuade her to consolidate her bills.
She has arthritis in her hip and feels pain each time she gets up to answer the phone.
"I am at the age now where I can't deal with this," Fitzgerald said. "They're about to drive me nuts.
"They should be fining these companies. If you are on the do-not-call list, they should be prosecuted because they are breaking the law."
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