The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the 50 state attorneys general released a joint statement on Monday designed to strengthen their ability to work together.
Elizabeth Warren, the Obama administration official in charge of setting up the CFPB, said the statement of principles would help the agency continue to rely on the attorneys general for the best enforcement of consumer protection laws.
"Collaboration between the CFPB and the attorneys general offers tremendous promise. By working together, we can make the whole greater than the sum of our parts," Warren said Monday in a speech to the National Association of Attorneys General Presidential Initiative Summit in Charlotte, N.C. "In the Dodd-Frank Act, Congress authorized attorneys general to enforce certain regulations that the CFPB writes, and in many cases to enforce our statute directly. These provisions are critical. While the value of shared law enforcement goals between federal and state officials is obvious to many of us in this room, we also know that federal banking regulators often have acted at cross-purposes with the attorneys general and state regulators in the past."
Under the agreement, the CFPB pledges to develop joint training programs with the AGs, share information, data and analysis about conduct and practices of consumer financial products, consult regulators to identify mutual enforcement priorities, pursue legal remedies, coordinate enforcement activities and create and support technologies for data sharing.
In the speech, Warren touted the work of the attorneys general.
"Attorneys general are natural partners for the CFPB in our enforcement work, just as state banking supervisors are natural partners in our supervision work," she said. "Indeed, you are indispensable partners. You are the states' chief law enforcement officers. You are also on the front lines of consumer protection, and you are intimately familiar with the range of problems that hit American families the hardest."
