CFPB accused of violating Dodd-Frank

A business group has accused the CFPB of violating the Dodd-Frank Act in its information requests

A business group has accused the CFPB of violating the Dodd-Frank Act in its information requests.
 
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote a letter last week to CFPB Director Richard Cordray in respect to the Bureau’s increasing number of requests for large quantities of data regarding individual consumers’ financial transactions.
 
The Chamber noted the CFPB may be in violation of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires that the Bureau issue an order or regulation in order to collect this information.
 
The statute restricts the Bureau’s ability to collect consumers’ personally-identifiable information, but it is not clear that the Bureau has in place appropriate safeguards to ensure compliance with that limitation, the letter noted.
 
In the letter, the Chamber expressed concern with the CFPB’s lack of transparency surrounding the collection of this data, which has made it “difficult to evaluate the prudence and the legality of the collection process.” 
 
The Chamber also said compliance with the Bureau’s demands “impose significant costs on companies because the Bureau’s specifications require companies to reconfigure existing data files and bear the expense of providing those files to the Bureau on a continuing basis.”