Tom Price: “I rise to express a few sincere and serious concerns with section 9 of the bill. This is the section that allows the…”

“I rise to express a few sincere and serious concerns with section 9 of the bill. This is the section that allows the public housing authorities, or the PHAs, to report the rental payments of its tenants to credit reporting agencies. Reporting alternative data, like rental payments, to the credit reporting agencies may indeed be a very good thing. The hope obviously is that increased alternative data will help improve the credit reports for consumers and, in the long run, provide them with better and less expensive access to credit. In this increasingly credit-drive society, that's truly an important thing. However, I've got four specific concerns with the way that the language in section 9 of this bill is written. First is the format that this data will take. The language of the underlying bill requires the PHAs and credit reporting agencies to establish a system and format for reporting the new data. This is obviously new territory for PHAs, and they haven't done it before and aren't financial institutions and have no history of providing reporting data in the proper format.”