Protecting Your Credit Score Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. LOUDERMILK. Madam Speaker, I thank our ranking member for not only yielding, but his fine leadership in this committee.

I also appreciate my colleague, Mr. Gottheimer, sponsor of this legislation. I appreciate his leadership on this, and I truly believe he did work very hard in a bipartisan manner to try to come to an agreement. And unfortunately, we just weren't able to close that gap. And I hope that going forward we will be able to do that, because this is something that we do support on this side with the certain constraints to protect the consumers' identity.

One of my major concerns on this is cybersecurity. As was spoken about earlier, the bill would create an online portal for consumers to access their credit reports from all three major credit bureaus in one place. The idea is a good idea, and very worth discussing and very worth pursuing. But in its current state, it would be a massive amount of sensitive data in one place, so it must be done in a way that is cybersecure to make sure that the information doesn't lead to more fraud and more identity theft.

As someone who has spent many years in the IT sector, as I know my good colleague, Mr. Gottheimer, has as well, I am very concerned about the potential of breaches of this portal.

We all remember the 2017 Equifax data breach that exposed the financial information of millions of Americans, and the last thing we should be doing is increasing the chance of that kind of event happening again. But this bill has the potential to do that very thing because it does not include robust cybersecurity protections to make sure the information on the portal is secure.

Another worthy goal of the bill is to make it easier for consumers to dispute errors in their credit reports. But the bill allows consumers to repeatedly dispute the same information on their credit reports, even if it is found to be accurate, which would lead to unnecessary and frivolous disputes.

Another significant concern I have with this bill is that it would expand the authority of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB is an unaccountable regulatory agency that took many rogue actions under the previous administration.

My colleagues on the other side of the aisle know that expanding the CFPB's power is a nonstarter for Republicans; therefore, I cannot support this bill. I ask my colleagues to oppose this bill.

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