Now that its future seems a little more secure and stable, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau plans to start “firing on all cylinders,” its director, Rohit Chopra said on Friday. This includes beefing up the size of its enforcement unit and moving forward with new regulations, especially in the area of credit reports and credit scores, Chopra said.
The Bureau was facing an uncertain future depending on how the Supreme Court ruled in a case that challenged how the federal regulator was funded. In a 7-2 ruling that was issued on Thursday, the Court said that the Bureau’s funding structure — receiving funds directly from the Federal Reserve Board and not through the Congressional appropriations process — was constitutional. Had the ruling gone the other way, there were a number of scenarios that could have occurred, with one of them being that everything the CFPB had done in its 14 years of existence would be wiped away.
With the case now in the rearview mirror, the CFPB will forge ahead, picking up the 14 cases that had been put on hold pending the outcome of the Supreme Court ruling, and in new matters.
“The court’s ruling makes crystal clear the CFPB is here to stay,” Chopra said on a call with reporters Friday, according to a published report. “The CFPB will be firing on all cylinders.”
The CFPB plans to increase the size of its enforcement unit by hiring an additional 75 attorneys, investigators, paralegals, and economists, raising the number of employees in that unit to 275. Chopra also mentioned that more regulations are likely on the horizon.
“Expect to see more work when it comes to credit reports and credit scores,” he said. “For the past few years, we’ve been taking a hard look at the medical bills that are getting parked on people’s credit reports. We do not want a system where debt collectors can weaponize a credit report to coerce someone to pay a bill that may not even owe.”
