With credit card delinquencies on the rise, federal lawmakers and regulators are rushing to reform industrywide abuses they say are hurting consumers, who have chalked up a whopping $2.5 trillion in debt.

U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., and Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., say unfair practices like high late-payment penalties and exorbitant interest rates are rampant in the credit card industry and need legislative intervention.

Today, Dodd, who chairs the influential Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, will introduce legislation intended to attack the“confusing, misleading, and in some cases predatory practices” by credit card companies.

Dodd's“Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act” (the C.A.R.D. Act) would improve aspects of credit card billing, marketing, and disclosure and halt abusive practices that“drag consumers into staggering amounts of debt, and too often harm, rather than help,” them, according to a news release.

Details of the bill will be released at a 1 p.m. news conference today in Washington, D.C.

Dodd's legislation comes on the heels of Maloney's proposed Credit Cardholders' Bill of Rights, which she has been trying to push through Congress since February.

On Friday, the Federal Reserve plans to release revisions involving credit card lending to its 2007 proposal,“Regulation Z,” which was originally aimed at addressing subprime mortgage loan problems governed by the Truth In Lending Act. Advance information about those revisions also was not available Tuesday.

The $2.5 trillion figure represents the total outstanding credit-card debt reported as of early April by the Federal Reserve.

The Florida-based Bankrate.com, which tracks interest rate trends, says the average fixed-rate credit card carries an interest rate of 13 percent, while cards with a variable rate have an average 12 percent rate. But consumers often can pay double those rates because of late payments or other violations of credit-card terms.

”We receive literally hundreds of these complaints every year, and we fight for every individual as best we can,” said Attorney General Richard Blumenthal. But he says his office is limited by current federal laws, which he says pre-empt many of Connecticut's consumer-protection provisions.

”And we're dealing with some of the biggest, wealthiest most powerful, institutions in the country,” Blumenthal said.

Dodd said that abuses by some credit card companies are worse than those found with the worst subprime mortgages. He said most people's salaries have not kept up with inflation, and high energy and gas costs, so they're using credit cards to get by.

”Some of these (credit card) rates are just unconscionable and totally unjustified,” Dodd said.

Jeannine Kenney, a senior policy analyst for the Washington, D.C.-based Consumers Union, publisher of Consumer Reports, said punitive rate increases are seldom justified.

Examples are plentiful of how credit card companies use late payments and other excuses“to squeeze more finance charges out of consumers at every opportunity,” Kenney said.

In a statement, Maloney called her bill a moderate one that lawmakers“can and will pass.” She is chairwoman of the House Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit Subcommittee.

”The bill has touched a nerve with the American people,” she stated, adding on Tuesday that the Federal Reserve's revised plan is too little too late.

”We think it is a really strong step forward in eliminating some of the abuses out there,” said Kenney.“It doesn't fix every problem; it doesn't cap fees or interest rates. But it does prohibit companies from charging retroactively.”

Maloney's bill would:

¦ prevent credit card companies from charging interest on an entire past balance even after most of it has been paid off (known as“double-cycle billing”);

¦ require a uniform time of 5 p.m. on a business day as the cutoff for crediting a customer's account;

¦ eliminate universal default, but only retroactively, said Kenney. That practice allows a credit card company to penalize customers who have an otherwise perfect history with the company, but may have been late on a mortgage payment or payment to another entity, Kenney said.

Credit card companies testified at an April 17 hearing that they don't like Maloney's bill. Discover Financial Services' executive vice president, Carlos Minetti, wants Congress to wait for Regulation Z, and calls Maloney's recommendations“unnecessary or counterproductive.”

”We do not use a missed payment with another lender as the basis for increasing interest rates,” Minetti stated in his testimony, referring to universal default.

Bank of America said in a statement e-mailed to The Day that Maloney's bill“would significantly hinder the ability of financial institutions to price the risks of credit card lending and would result in less credit being made available to creditworthy borrowers, with generally higher prices for those who do receive credit.”

Kenney disagreed.

”It's not true that there aren't other means to control risk,” she said. If a customer fails to meet conditions of the card, companies“could freeze the credit line, work out a payment plan, but you don't have to keep extending (a customer's) credit when you think they're such a risk.”