The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) announced on Tuesday that it will seek public opinion on how to streamline regulations stemming more than a dozen consumer financial laws that the agency inherited from seven different federal agencies with the implementation of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
“Our goal is to make it easier for banks, credit unions and others to follow the rules,” said Raj Date, Special Advisor to the Secretary of the Treasury on the CFPB, whose authority replaces that of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), among other agencies. “We’re asking the public to help us identify and prioritize concrete ways that we can streamline the regulations we inherited so that they work better for consumers and the firms that serve them.”
The public is being asked to identify provisions of inherited regulations that deserve top priority from the CFPB for updating, modifying, or eliminating because they’re “outdated, unduly burdensome, or unnecessary.”
The bureau is also open to suggestions that could help make regulatory compliance easier.
These suggestions, says the CFPB, could include ways to simplify regulations that have become unnecessarily difficult to understand or comply with over time; standardize definitions of common terms across regulations where statutes permit; update regulations that are now outdated or unnecessary due to changing technologies; or remove unnecessary restrictions on consumer choice or business innovation.
The CFPB now plans to republish inherited regulations and to consider “practical measures that will make it easier for firms, especially smaller ones, to comply with the inherited regulations.”
Prior to the bureau’s establishment, rule-writing authority was held by the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, HUD, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, Federal Trade Commission, National Credit Union Administration, Office of Comptroller of the Currency, and Office of Thrift Supervision.
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Written by Alyssa Gerace
