Protecting Your Credit Score Act of 2019

Floor Speech

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Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition to the motion to recommit.

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Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I appreciate my colleague from Virginia. I greatly appreciate his service on the committee and his expertise in all matters of data integrity, and normally I defer to you on everything, but this one is kind of silly.

Look, we all know you can't open a bank account, you can't buy a car, you can't get a mortgage, you can't get a credit card without giving somebody your Social Security number. We also know, and you know well, that when the hackers want to try to get that data, they don't limit themselves to public websites, they go in to find where the servers are.

The Equifax breach wasn't because it was sitting in a public-facing consumer website, it was because they knew where the data was. All that data is still out there. We are not protecting anything by saying, let's not link this to a Social Security number.

We have a legit data issue. How are you going to uniquely identify every American? The way we do that now is through our Social Security number, we have to protect that.

We have to make sure that every company that maintains personal records of Americans bends over backwards to protect that data. For the most part they do, sometimes they don't. But you have absolutely no greater protection by saying that in this one specific instance on this one specific public-facing website you can't use a Social Security number.

Now, we know this. We all know this. That is why when we debated the bill in committee, we included the provision to put a yearlong study for the GAO to figure this out, to determine if maybe there is maybe some better unique identifier they could develop for this bill.

And, quite frankly, maybe we should apply that to a whole host of other issues. Maybe the Social Security number should not be the unique identifier. That is a long conversation. I trust the GAO, for a year, to figure that out.

And I have complete trust that in the next 5 minutes we are not going to come up with a wiser, more complete solution than the GAO will come up with over the next year, which it will take to roll this bill out. So all that would happen if we accept this MTR is to make a hasty decision.

It is not particularly well thought out, it doesn't solve an actual problem. For what? To stop people from actually making sure that they can protect themselves from faulty credit. Because this problem is going on right now. We have an economy that is in meltdown, and if people have bad credit because of some error and they can't buy a car and they can't open a bank account, they can't take out a mortgage, that slows down our economy.

Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues, oppose this MTR and vote ``yes'' on the final package.

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