She needs to be thrown in jail and all their net worth clawed back to taxpayers
WASHINGTON—A Consumer Financial Protection Bureau employee forwarded to a personal email account confidential information on thousands of consumers and dozens of financial firms, in what the agency has described to U.S. lawmakers as a major incident.
The employee, who no longer works at the CFPB, made an unauthorized transfer of records containing personal information on approximately 256,000 consumers at one institution, as well as confidential supervisory information on 45 institutions, a CFPB spokesman said. There is no evidence the records were shared beyond the former employee’s personal email account, the spokesman said.
While most of the personal information was tied to consumers at one institution, the emails included information on consumers from seven firms, the CFPB spokesman said. The CFPB hasn’t publicly identified the firms involved in the breach or the former employee who made the transfers.
Agency officials notified lawmakers about the incident on March 21, but they haven’t discussed it publicly. The incident hasn’t previously been reported. The CFPB hasn’t said why the employee forwarded the data.
The incident appears to be more limited in scope than some previous government-data breaches, such as when hackers stole the records of more than 20 million people from the servers of the Office of Personnel Management as part of at least two cyberattacks in 2014. Top White House and administration officials in the past have come under scrutiny for using personal email accounts for work.
Republican lawmakers are pressing CFPB Director Rohit Chopra for more details, saying many questions about the incident remain unanswered.
“This breach raises concerns with how the CFPB safeguards consumers’ personally identifiable information,” said Rep. Patrick McHenry (R., N.C.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee.