[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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