State Rep. Bessie Moody-Lawrence of Rock Hill said she ordered a company's real estate training kit after seeing it advertised on television. To pay for the kit, she authorized the company to debit her bank account electronically.

Later, she said, the company kept mailing solicitations for additional products -- even though she didn't want anything else. She had to respond to each solicitation or the company would automatically debit her account for the unwanted products.

"I had to call them and have a long discussion over the phone, almost a knock-down-drag-out, 'Don't charge my account for anything else,'" Moody-Lawrence said. She's one of 28 state lawmakers who have introduced legislation to give consumers more rights to halt preauthorized electronic payments.

Under the Automatic Payment Protection Act, banks and vendors would have to "conspicuously" disclose in writing and orally the procedure for stopping such payments, and they could be sued for violations.

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NACHA-The Electronic Payments Association, an association of financial institutions that sets industry rules for electronic payments, estimates that U.S. consumers paid 3 billion bills by automatic payment last year.

Consumers already have some rights under federal law, but Rep. Joe Mahaffey of Spartanburg County, the state bill's chief sponsor, said they need more. Mahaffey said he introduced the measure after hearing from constituents who had difficulty stopping payments.

"Even when you send them a letter, they do not always stop it," he said. Rep. Lewis Vaughn of Greer said he signed onto the measure because of an experience he had with a credit-card company. The company, Vaughn said, "just started accessing my account for whatever I owed them without my permission" even though he pays his balance each month.

Vaughn said he later discovered that his agreement with the company allowed it to do what it did.

Michael Herd, a spokesman for NACHA, said consumers who want to halt automatic payments should contact the third-party vendors that are charging their accounts. The network used for such payments isn't set up in a way that banks can easily stop them, he said.

"When you write a check and you give it to a company, your bank doesn't know what your arrangement is with that company," Herd said. "They just know that, with the payment system, they get a check that says debit your account, so they do it."

The more than 11,000 financial institutions that are members of NACHA require third-party vendors to tell customers how to stop electronic payments, Herd said.

Last year, he said, only 25 out of every 100,000 consumers had a company debit their account after revoking their authorization to do so. "That seems to us like a very low rate," Herd said.

Lloyd Hendricks, president of the South Carolina Bankers Association, said his group opposes the measure in part because consumers are already protected by federal law. "Sometimes you come in and superimpose additional burdens that just don't work that are already covered by federal law," Hendricks said.

Federal law allows consumers to stop pre-authorized electronic payments by notifying their financial institutions orally or in writing at least three business days before the scheduled date of the transfer.

But Jean Ann Fox, director of consumer protection for the Consumer Federation of America, said consumers need more understanding of their rights.

"Just the whole electronic banking arena is so new to consumers that it's really confusing," she said. The legislation has been referred to the House Labor, Commerce and Industry Committee, chaired by Rep. Harry Cato of Travelers Rest.

Cato said he still employs the "old-fashioned method of writing a check" to pay bills, but he's talked to others who have had problems stopping electronic payments.

Cato said a lobbyist has questioned whether the existing federal law would supercede any state laws. Cato said his committee will likely have a hearing on the bill in April, and its chances for passage are good "if we find that we can do it."