Former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) testified yesterday at a House Financial Services subcommittee hearing that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's (CFPB) expansive data collection was a flawed bureaucracy that can't be trusted with personal information, The Hill reported today. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) found last year that the CFPB ran 12 data collection projects tapping into information from 75 million credit card accounts, 173 million mortgages, 10.7 million consumer credit reports, 5.5 million student loans and between 15 million and 40 million storefront payday loans. Republicans, long critical of the agency, said that its structure and a slew of recent data breaches put American consumers at risk. "It is absolutely shocking to me the level of regulatory power these agencies have over the American people," added Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), panning the "casualness" with which lawmakers talk about collecting data. Democrats quickly pointed to Gingrich's affiliation with the U.S. Consumer Coalition, an anti-CFPB group, and his 2012 presidential campaign's collection and sale of voter data. Deepak Gupta, a former CFPB official, said most of the data the agency collected was aggregated. He also criticized the committee for not investigating breaches of financial information. Read more.
If you're in the business of consumer credit, finance, debt collection, etc., learn why the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is considered the most powerful consumer debt industry-related agency in the government. Click here to watch ABI's Sam Gerdano interview Alane Becket of Becket & Lee LLP (Malvern, Pa.) and Joann Needleman of Clark Hill PLC (Philadelphia) about the CFPB.
Becket is also a co-author of the lead article of the December ABI Journal, titled "What Is the CFPB, and Why Should You Care?" Click here to read the article.
