The watchdog, the Office of Inspector General for the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (OIG), said in a summary of the report that it discovered during an ongoing audit that the CFPB had left the hardware at the former offices and had not verified whether the assets were properly secured.
The CFPB maintains databases that include consumer complaints, financial information and confidential supervisory records on financial institutions, and some of that information may reside on the regulator’s hardware assets, the OIG said in its report.
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Because it found a potential security risk involving the CFPB’s hardware assets during its audit, and determined that it required the CFPB’s immediate attention, the OIG issued a draft management alert ahead of its full report.
In a CFPB response to the OIG’s recommendation, which was dated Sept. 18 and included in OIG’s report, CFPB Chief Information Officer Christopher Chilbert said that the regulator agrees with the OIG’s recommendation and had already begun removing physical assets from the former offices.
Chilbert added that because the CFPB has a centralized data center and uses cloud providers, the assets in the regional offices do not contain databases with sensitive information. Chilbert said that the OIG has no basis for its assertion that the hardware increases vulnerability to data breaches.
“Nonetheless, as noted above, we are in the process of implementing the recommendation,” Chilbert said in the Sept. 18 response.
The OIG said in its report that the CFPB concurred with its recommendation, that the regulator planned to complete its decommissioning of the former regional offices by Sept. 30, and that it would provide the OIG with an update when finished.
“The actions described by the CFPB appear to be responsive to our recommendation,” the OIG said in the report. “We will follow up to ensure that the recommendation is fully addressed.”
Bloomberg Law reported Monday (Sept. 28) that the Trump administration has been attempting to withhold funding from the CFPB and that a recent court ruling blocked one of those attempts.
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