Anyone wondering how consumer rights might be faring in the Washington debate over financial regulatory reform has a lot to consider theses days. For example, the Federal Reserve Board published its final rules on credit card practices last week, requiring new disclosures and banning some abusive practices that have been immensely lucrative for the banking industry. Among the regulations going into effect next month are these: Credit card issuers can't jack up interest rates for the ensuing 12 months after an account is opened -- and if your rate does go up after that, it will apply only to new charges, not an existing balance. Credit card issuers are concerned, of course, that these rules will crimp their profits. So some companies are devising creative ways to generate new revenue. An example is Alliance Data Systems, a big issuer of private-label credit cards like those that specialty stores offer. It has decided to levy a $1 monthly surcharge to customers who choose to receive account statements by mail. Proof, yet again, that if you close the door, they will come in through the window. And if you close the window, they blow through the door. The $1 statement fee from Alliance certainly seems to flout the spirit of both the Fed's regulations and the Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. But because it is labeled a statement fee, it does not appear to violate the letter of the law, which barred credit card issuers from levying separate fees when a consumer submitted a payment, whether 'by mail, electronic transfer, telephone authorization, or other means, unless such payment involves an expedited service by a service representative of the creditor.' Asked about the practice, a spokeswoman for Alliance Data Systems said the company is 'a credible, responsible public company that prides itself on upholding sound, ethical business practices, and adhering to the Credit Card Act is no exception.' William Ryan, an analyst at Portales Partners in New York, said the $1 statement fee wasn't a surprise, given Alliance's business model. 'A disproportionate part of Alliance Data Systems' yield comes from penalty fees,' he said, 'so by default they would be more proportionately impacted by the Credit Card Act than an American Express that caters to higher-end customers.' Ryan estimates that the company's $4 billion in assets generate $400 million a year in penalty fees. If half of that vanished as a result of the Credit Card Act, the company's per-share earnings could drop by $2.25. Ryan estimates that Alliance earned $3.02 a share in 2009. To be sure, Alliance is not the only company working to mitigate the effects of new credit card restrictions. And that makes it all the more imperative that such attempts by card issuers be met with an aggressive regulatory response. That, however, would be a lot to ask, given that the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is tasked with enforcing the new rules at most card issuers. This institution not only failed in its oversight of risky practices at Citigroup, to cite just one case -- it more recently objected to one of the sound credit card rules the Fed is putting into effect. 'The OCC to the end fought the rules and tried to get huge exceptions, carrying water again for the large banks they were regulating,' said Travis B. Plunkett, legislative director for the Consumer Federation of America. 'Now they have to enforce this law that they disagreed with.' Plunkett recalled that John C. Dugan, the head of the comptroller's office, sent a letter to the Fed about a year ago recommending that it carve out of the credit card rules some of the same items opposed by the banks. One major issue that the comptroller's office argued against was the ban on retroactive interest rate increases; it argued that banks should be allowed to raise rates more quickly on potentially risky consumers. Bob Garsson, a spokesman for the comptroller's office, said: 'We felt the restrictions could have a perverse effect over time of making credit more expensive to more people if banks have a more limited ability to reprice based on changes to the consumer's risk profile.' The option recommended by the comptroller's office would have required advance notice to consumers and would have given them the chance to opt out, Garsson said. He said the agency viewed that as a reasonable compromise. Happily, the Fed ignored this argument. I asked the comptroller's office if the new rules meant that it would hire additional examiners for enforcement purposes. Garsson said the agency's ranks were adequately staffed. Whether the office will pursue companies flouting the spirit or the letter of the new rules is an important question because consumers do not have a right in all cases to sue companies that violate the rules. Such lawsuits can act as a governor on dubious behavior, but consumers and others can't bring suits involving certain practices covered by the regulations. (Junk fees like those for submitting payments, for example, are among the areas where regulators alone may have policing power.) Dugan continues to be in the big banks' corner on other matters as well. As a member of the board of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., he attended a meeting the FDIC convened Tuesday to consider a rule that would allow it to examine executive compensation programs at banks as part of its risk-based assessment system. At the public meeting, members of the FDIC staff detailed their reasons for considering the new rule. Among the arguments: risky compensation plans had been 'a contributing factor' in recent bank failures, according to the FDIC's inspector general. The rule proposal passed the board of the FDIC with two dissents, one of them from Dugan. He said that it was 'premature' for the FDIC to weigh in on executive pay at insured banks, adding that both Congress and the Federal Reserve Board were developing their own compensation guidance. 'It would be very unfortunate to have an end result where insured institutions and perhaps their holding companies were subject to inconsistent schemes evaluating the risk of their executive compensation programs,' he said at the meeting. Sheila Bair, who heads the FDIC, retorted: 'To suggest this agency should not do anything when there is such an overwhelming amount of evidence that this is a clearly a contributor to the crisis and to losses we are suffering, I just cannot understand that.' Make that two of us. And doesn't the notion of waiting for the Fed or Congress to write rules on executive pay at banks sound an awful lot like the approach regulators took in the subprime lending arena? Declaring that all agencies have to agree before any action can be taken is a time-honored way to ensure that nothing happens. None of this is a surprise, mind you. But it does reinforce the need for a consumer protection agency that has the teeth to police financial institutions' offerings. For years, consumer protection has been of little interest to the major financial regulatory agencies, with the exception of the FDIC. There is no reason to believe that this mind-set will change, given that the same folks who failed to rein in abusive practices years ago are still in place at these shops. And it is just plain boneheaded to entrust consumer protection to agencies run by people who seem to care more about the interests of the financial institutions they regulate. Opponents of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which is part of the financial reform working its way through Congress, say that such a thing smacks of 'the nanny state.' But isn't that preferable to 'the pirate state' that brought this economy to its knees? 