[Congressional Record Volume 166, Number 119 (Monday, June 29, 2020)]
[House]
[Pages H2663-H2664]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
PROTECTING YOUR CREDIT SCORE ACT OF 2019
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to clause 1(c) of rule XIX, further
consideration of the bill (H.R. 5332) to amend the Fair Credit
Reporting Act to ensure that consumer reporting agencies are providing
fair and accurate information reporting in consumer reports, and for
other purposes, will now resume.
The Clerk read the title of the bill.
Motion to Recommit
Mr. RIGGLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I have a motion to recommit at the desk.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is the gentleman opposed to the bill?
Mr. RIGGLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, I am opposed to the bill in its current
form.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The Clerk will report the motion to
recommit.
The Clerk read as follows:
Mr. Riggleman moves to recommit the bill H.R. 5332 to the
Committee on Financial Services with instructions to report
the same back to the House forthwith with the following
amendment:
Strike section 3 and insert the following:
SEC. 3. PROHIBITION ON THE USE OF SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS.
(a) In General.--Section 605 of the Fair Credit Reporting
Act (15 U.S.C. 1681c) is amended by adding at the end the
following:
``(i) Prohibition on the Use of Social Security Numbers.--A
consumer reporting agency described under section 603(p)--
``(1) may not make any consumer report containing a social
security number; and
``(2) may not use the social security number of a consumer
as a method to verify the consumer.''.
(b) Conforming Amendment.--Section 609(a)(1) of the Fair
Credit Reporting Act (15 U.S.C. 1681g(a)(1)) is amended by
striking ``except that--'' and all that follows through ``(B)
nothing'' and inserting ``except that nothing''.
(c) Effective Date.--The amendments made by this section
shall take effect on January 1, 2021.
Mr. RIGGLEMAN (during the reading). Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous
consent to dispense with the reading.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the
gentleman from Virginia?
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from
Virginia is recognized for 5 minutes in support of his motion.
Mr. RIGGLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, this amendment will not kill the bill but
simply ensure that it will not exacerbate the risks of identity theft
or misuse of consumer data.
Mr. Speaker, a Social Security number may be the single most
important piece of government-issued identification that a U.S. citizen
can have.
H.R. 5332 takes that single most important piece of identification
and increases its overuse, which will have negative consequences for
consumers.
In the digital age, relying on one number that defines each of us has
made us extremely vulnerable to identity theft. Someone can use your
Social Security number to open credit cards, take loans in your name,
and destroy your credit.
According to the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, identity theft now
affects between 500,000 and 700,000 people annually. Victims often do
not discover the crime until months after its occurrence.
As we speak, Washington State is working to recover more than $500
million in unemployment benefits paid to criminals who used stolen
identities to file claims during the coronavirus pandemic.
These attacks on data will only escalate. We are in a new era of
economic and data warfare and creating a common node of exploitation, a
Social Security number, in a centralized location will advance bad
actors' ability to infiltrate our data.
When your Social Security number is exposed and sold through
nefarious means, it is extremely difficult to simply go get a new one.
This bill will cause a proliferation in the use of Social Security
numbers. That is exactly the wrong direction to go.
The amendment I am offering simply ensures that we are not putting
policies forward that increase the risks to consumers. During the floor
debate, the bill's own sponsor agreed that we should be studying
alternative ways to identify consumers as it relates to credit
reporting.
The bill directs GAO to study the means and feasibility to replace
our Social Security numbers as an identifier.
To that end, I would simply ask my colleagues, before we put
consumers at risk, let's do our work. Let's see what GAO reports and
work together on a bipartisan solution.
We need to make sure that whatever we do in the name of improving
accuracy in credit reporting is not putting Americans at greater risk
of fraud.
Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
Mr. CASTEN of Illinois. Mr. Speaker, I claim the time in opposition
to the motion to recommit.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The gentleman from Illinois is recognized
for 5 minutes.
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.
[[Page H2664]]
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.
Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Without objection, the previous question is
ordered on the motion to recommit.
There was no objection.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. The question is on the motion to recommit.
The question was taken; and the Speaker pro tempore announced that
the noes appeared to have it.
Mr. RIGGLEMAN. Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays.
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to section 3 of House Resolution
965, the yeas and nays are ordered.
Pursuant to clause 8 of rule XX, further proceedings on this question
are postponed.
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