On Tuesday, December 11, 2012, the House is scheduled to consider, H.R. 5817, the Eliminate Privacy Notice Confusion Act, under a suspension of the rules, requiring a two-thirds majority vote for approval.  The bill was introduced by Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer (R-MO) on May 17, 2012, and was referred to the Committee on Financial Services.

H.R. 5817 would amend the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act (GLBA) requirement for financial institutions to provide annual privacy notices to their customers.  The annual notice requirement would be eliminated for any financial institution that: (1) provides nonpublic personal information about consumers to unaffiliated third parties in accordance with GLBA, (2) does not share with its affiliates information about its past transactions with consumers, and (3) has not changed its disclosure policies and practices since its most recent disclosures were sent to consumers.

According to a Dear Colleague letter signed by the bill’s sponsor, “Under current law, all financial institutions are required to give annual privacy notices to all of their customers that explain their information sharing practices.  Financial institutions are required to give these notices each year even if their privacy policies have not changed, which at best creates unnecessary and redundant waste for financial institutions and customers, and at worst causes consumers to routinely ignore notices that may contain information about important changes.”

Further, “This bill would eliminate the millions of costly, confusing, and often ignored mailings that cost millions to produce each year.  As a result, information included in mailings would likely be more significant to the consumer because they would come only after a change in policy.”

There was no Congressional Budget Office (CBO) cost estimate available for this legislation.