Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray said Wednesday that the agency intends to provide more detail to Congress and the public on its spending plans going forward.
Testifying before a House panel Wednesday, Cordray said Republican concerns about how much information the bureau has provided on its budget are fair. While the bureau's justification for its $448 million 2013 budget request is more comprehensive than it was in its first year, Cordray said, "it is not yet where we want it to be and where it will be in future years."
"I think that there is more we can provide and more that we intend to provide, and we will continue to ramp that up," Cordray said.
Republicans, however, did not appear satisfied, arguing they should have some say in those plans via the appropriations process.
Rep. Spencer Bachus, R-Ala., the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said the agency was designed in a way that avoids crucial oversight and accountability, primarily because it receives its funding directly through transfers from the Federal Reserve Board.
"If they spend $100 million on paperclips, we can't even say, 'Wait a minute, you can't do that, next year we're going to cut your budget,'" Bachus said of the CFPB. "No matter what they spend their budget on, we have absolutely no control."
Democrats emphasized that Congress still has significant authority to oversee the bureau's activities. Wednesday marked at least the sixth oversight hearing Congress has held on the CFPB, said Rep. Barney Frank, the committee's top Democrat.
The bureau has also undergone two audits — one by the Government Accountability Office, which gave the bureau a clean bill of health, and an independent third-party audit, which found CFPB has addressed all budgeting requirements under Dodd-Frank, Cordray said.
If the bureau did ever have to "embarrass ourselves" by explaining a $100 million expenditure for paperclips to Congress, Cordray said, "That's very meaningful oversight."
In addition to posting the audit results and its budget justification on its Web site, the bureau has also begun posting quarterly expenditure reports within 30 to 45 days of the end of each quarter — something other agencies don't do, he said.
It released a 25-page justification of its budget this week outlining plans for spending in 2013. That's double the length of the justification for fiscal year 2012, and nearly three times as long as the 9-page document released in 2011, when the bureau still had only a handful of employees and was housed in the Treasury Department.
