Previews New Legislation to Protect Homebuyers
Washington, DC – December 17, 2015 – (RealEstateRama) — U.S. Representative Randy Hultgren (IL-14) today raised concerns with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s (CFPB) implementation of new reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) during a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations.
“I have been troubled by all of the stories I have heard about what happens when consumer financial information gets into the wrong hands,” said Rep. Hultgren at the hearing. “Our government should be held to the highest standard when it comes to protecting the personal information it holds on the American people.”
Dr. Mark Calabria, Director of Financial Regulation Studies at the Cato Institute, testified: “Even before this [rule] from what was publicly available for HMDA, you could link to courthouse records and identify individuals with that data.”
“This is a major crisis for the whole government,” said Newt Gingrich, former Speaker of the House.
In the coming months, Rep. Hultgren plans to introduce legislation to protect homebuyers’ personal information by requiring the Comptroller General of the United States to conduct a study to determine whether the data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act could present privacy issuers for borrowers.
“The Bureau’s implementation of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act should be added to the long list of examples of regulatory overreach by the most unaccountable financial regulator in history,” said Rep. Hultgren. “The Bureau claims its extensive data collection program is intended to protect consumers, but it overlooks the government’s foremost responsibility of keeping Americans safe. They should take every possible measure to protect our financial information; the simplest way is to not demand it in the first place.”
The Home Mortgage Disclosure Act was enacted in 1975. With the passage of Dodd-Frank, the responsibility for collecting this information was transferred from the Federal Reserve to the CFPB. The Bureau finalized a regulation on October 15, 2015, putting in place new reporting requirements that exceed those mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act. HMDA data is anonymized by the CFPB before being published on the website of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC). Concerns have been raised as to how this data could be linked to other publicly available data sources to re-identify specific borrowers and their personally identifiable information.
