Thread: Obama administration paid contractors millions to snoop through Americans’ financial

Daily Caller News Foundation


Obama administration paid contractors millions to snoop through Americans’ financial data

06/27/2013
Brendan Bordelon

A secretive data collection program run by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau allows private contractors access to millions of Americans’ personal financial information, according to a government accountability group.

The information may also be shared with other federal agencies.
Documents obtained by Washington-based Judicial Watchthrough the Freedom of Information Act illustrate the cost and scope of the program, which business groups and some Republican lawmakers have assailed as invasive and potentially illegal.

The Daily Caller News Foundation previously reported how the CFPB compelled banks to comply with the program by making successful passage of routine inspections conditional on supplying massive amounts of their customers’ financial information. The new documents shed light on what happens to that data once banks have turned it over.

Multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms signed contracts with the bureau in 2012 to gather, store and analyze mountains of data on Americans’ credit card transactions. One company, Argus Information and Advisory Services, was paid $2.9 million last year to perform such tasks, with a total payout of $15 million scheduled for 2017.

Experian, another information services group, was tasked with assembling a “nationally representative panel of credit information on consumers” from “a national database of credit files.” The contract states that the panel will include the contents of 5 million consumer accounts along with their credit scores, postal code, age and year of birth.

The panel will initially contain ten years’ worth of individual consumer information, will be updated quarterly and will periodically add new credit files from the CFPB’s growing national database. The contract is worth almost $8.5 million.

A final company, Deloitte Consulting, is being paid nearly $5 million to provide software and computer instruction related to the program.

“When you’re trying to snoop into the files of millions, it’s expensive,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, in an interview with TheDC News Foundation.

Another document states that contractors “may be required by the CFPB to share credit card data collected from the Banks with additional government entities,” raising the prospect that personal financial information may be sent to one or more unspecified federal agencies.

“Who knows where else they’re sending [the data] to?” said Fitton. “There’s talk about tying it to mortgage data, so they might be sharing with the Federal Housing Finance Agency.”

The Experian contract says that the information is being collected “for use in a wide range of policy research projects,” echoing CFPB Director Richard Cordray’s April 23 contention that the data will be used only to help “inform policy decisions.”

Fitton, however, believes the program is not only wasteful but a threat to financial security. “This data can only be managed by hiring scores of contractors and outside government entities to analyze it,” he said. “When you widen the circle, you lessen security. It would not surprise me if in a year or two we hear about some contractor running off with this data.”
“The NSA stuff is almost a sideshow compared to the financial information that the government’s compiling,” he concluded.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/06/27/ob...inancial-data/

CFPB Amassing Data

[B]Last Updated: June 27, 2013
Synopsis

Judicial Watch has obtained documents, pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) which reveal the agency has spent millions to track — down to the neighborhood level — the financial activity of unwitting Americans without their permission.

“ig data is the cutting edge of analysis and research right now in every field that involves analytics in this country,” testified Richard Cordray when questioned about the agency’s conduct by the U.S. Senate Banking Committee during a hearing on April 23, 2013. “Uh, you know, IBM, the big banks, every company that deals with the public is gathering and crunching as much data as they can.”

The hearing prompted Judicial Watch to launch this investigation into the federal government’s newest agency.

According to the documents received through a FOIA request filed on April 24, 2013, CFPB’s strides in the data collection race include:

• overlapping contracts with multiple credit reporting agencies and accounting firms to gather, store, and share credit card data as shown in the task list of a contract with Argus Information & Advsy Srs LLC worth $2.9M. ;
• an “indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity” contract with Experian worth up to $8,426,650 to track daily consumer habits of select individuals down to the zip code-plus-four level without their awareness or assent;
• minimal background checks for most contractors and a requirement that staffers possess some alien status, though which status is expected is not specified;
• the largest sum so far (i.e. $4,951,333 for software and instruction) paid to Deloitte Consulting LLP, reported by Forbes to have been at the heart of a conflict of interest in auditing the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP).

Cordray continues to act as CFPB’s director despite a federal court’s invalidation of his “recess” appointment as unconstitutional on Jan. 25, 2013. He replaced as de facto head of the agency Elizabeth Warren, now U.S. Senator for Massachusetts and a delegate to the banking committee. CFPB, which was created by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform & Consumer Protection Act of 2010, is not dependent on the appropriations process for its funding, currently amounting to $350 million, per the attached balance sheet. Because it is funded by a percentage of fees collected by the Federal Reserve, CFPB is not subject to fiscal constraints imposed by the U.S. Congress on other executive branch agencies. The combined value of all contracts released by CFPB last week respecting its data collection efforts are worth at least $11,792,134.75 and possibly as much as $18,595,984.75 given the indefinite nature of some of the agreements.


- See more at: http://www.judicialwatch.org./bullet....7vEZxHHC.dpuf