A Connecticut attorney has filed suit in federal court in Washington, D.C. challenging a demand by the fledgling U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to hand over communications with bankruptcy clients.
Kimberly Pisinski and her co-plaintiff — support services provider Morgan Drexen Integrated Systems —have refused an investigative demand from the CFPB that they claim asks for thousands of personally identifiable documents of bankruptcy clients containing information including names, addresses, amount of debt, creditors and other details about communications with attorneys.
Pisinski and Morgan Drexen are seeking declaratory relief on the ground that the CFPB doesn’t have constitutional authority to regulate legal services provided by an attorney to a client.
Republicans in Congress have challenged the CFPB’s data collection, recently asking the Government Accountability Office to look into its practices.
The CFPB has said it is researching a range of policy topics and that its data collection is authorized under the 2010 Dodd-Frank federal law. The bureau told U.S. News & World Report this month that individual identities are masked to preserve confidentiality.
The agency told U.S. News that names, addresses and full account numbers of 5 million study subjects are withheld from contractors analyzing the data, but said, zip codes, Census block numbers, dates of birth dates are recorded.
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