Will Installment Loans Get Painted with CFPB’s Payday Brush?

From: American Banker

Installment lenders are concerned that efforts by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to curb the most abusive and predatory practices associated with payday loans will wreak havoc on their business.

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New Source of Federal Dysfunctional Database Privacy Leak Concerns: CFPB

Editor’s Note: Cross-posted from Fisma Focus. For more information on federal database failures, see The Report of the Administrative Conference of the United States (ACUS) on the Oversight of Federal Databases.

From: National Mortgage News

CFPB Must Address Lenders’ HMDA Data Privacy Concerns

By

The implementation date of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s final Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Rule is fast approaching and the mortgage industry still has not received any answers in regard to their data privacy concerns.

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Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Additional Actions Needed to Support a Fair and Inclusive Workplace

Editor’s Note: The complete report, GAO-16-62, is available here. Below is an excerpt.

From: General Accountability Office

GAO Management Report: Improvements Needed in CFPB’s Internal Controls and Accounting Procedures

Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from GAO-16-522R. The complete report may be found here.

From: GAO

Significant Deficiency in Internal Control over Accounting for Property, Equipment, and Software

During our fiscal year 2015 audit, we continued to find that CFPB did not effectively implement internal controls over the recording of its property, equipment, and software, which led to significant, but not material, misstatements in its financial statements. Specifically, CFPB did not have effective procedures to properly distinguish between costs that should be recorded as capitalized software and those that should be recorded as gross costs (i.e., expensed) and did not timely detect and correct these errors in its records. In addition, we found that CFPB did not effectively maintain accurate inventory records to validate the existence of its recorded assets.

We first identified deficiencies in CFPB’s controls over accounting for property, equipment, and software, which we collectively considered a significant deficiency, during our fiscal year 2013 financial statement audit. Consequently, in May 2014, we separately reported the details of the significant deficiency, along with recommendations for corrective actions. Based on these recommendations, with which CFPB concurred, it has taken actions over the past 2 years to improve the reporting of property, equipment, and software. For example, in fiscal year 2015, the Office of the Chief Financial Officer (OCFO) performed more-frequent (monthly instead of quarterly) reviews of property, equipment, and software transactions. However, control deficiencies remain.

Congress Mounts New Probe Of Agency Snooping On Consumers

Editor’s Note: Cross-posted from Regulatory Cyber Security/FISMA Focus.

From: Daily Caller

Richard Pollock, Reporter

Congress is mounting another attempt to determine if the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is complying with federal cybersecurity standards as it amasses an unprecedented amount of private data on personal consumer behavior, The Daily Caller News Foundation has learned.

Privacy advocates are alarmed about CFPB’s accumulation of data on 991 million consumer credit card accounts and 53 million residential mortgages.

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