"'What’s so egregious in this case is it’s not just that payday lenders paid for the study, it’s that they actually wrote the study,' said Daniel Stevens, executive director for the Campaign for Accountability, which has complained about the industry’s attempts to influence scholarly research for years. The Washington, D.C., nonprofit released more than 400 pages of internal KSU emails about the December 2014 study in recent weeks, after fighting a three-year legal battle to obtain the public records that went to the Georgia Supreme Court."

"'Not only is the payday-lending industry choosing professors to write studies on their behalf; in this case they are writing the studies themselves,' said Daniel Stevens, executive director of the Campaign for Accountability. 'I have never seen anything like this.'"

On February 25, 2019, CfA released a new report, Academic for Hire, revealing that a lawyer for the payday lending industry, Hilary Miller, funded, designed, and edited an academic study defending the payday lending industry. Mr. Miller, the chairman of the Consumer Credit Research Foundation worked closely with Kennesaw State University Professor Jennifer Priestley to develop a study for the payday lending industry to use to lobby against government regulations that would have protected consumers from payday lenders.

"The previously unreported e-mails, provided to The Post by the Campaign for Accountability, are surfacing as the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is using research by Mann as it prepares to nix the rollout of payday-loan restrictions that the agency proposed in 2017."

"A self-described nonpartisan watchdog group on Thursday urged the Senate Ethics Committee to investigate possible connections between donations from the payday lending industry to Sen. Richard Shelby's campaign account and congressional votes that benefitted the industry."

"On Thursday, the watchdog group Campaign for Accountability asked two Congressional ethics committees to investigate 14 members of Congress for taking official actions in support of the payday lending industry while at the same time accepting campaign contributions from that industry."

On May 3, 2018, CfA asked the Senate Select Committee on Ethics and the Office of Congressional Ethics to investigate whether two senators and 12 representatives violated congressional rules and criminal law by accepting campaign contributions from the payday lending industry shortly before or after taking official actions in support of the industry’s priorities.

"The dispute is about whether a watchdog group may obtain correspondence between a Kennesaw State University professor and a payday lending group that commissioned the university to conduct a study. The group, which calls itself the Consumer Credit Research Foundation, publishes reports favorable to the industry."

On February 1, 2018, CfA announced that the Supreme Court of Georgia is scheduled to hear oral arguments on Monday, February 5, 2018, in CfA’s case against the Consumer Credit Research Foundation, a payday lending nonprofit that funded a favorable academic study by a professor at Kennesaw State University.