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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, has begun operating a new website.  It is not the typical website run by government regulators—it invites consumers to submit comments by YouTube and Twitter.

The site discloses the CFPB now has 100 employees.  It has moved out of Treasury Department offices and into temporary headquarters which it anticipates it will occupy for the next several months.  The conference rooms in the temporary headquarters are named Dodd-Frank (after the name of the legislation that created the CFPB); Full Disclosure (one of the CFPB’s goals for the costs, risks, and other important terms of consumer financial products and services); Accountability (another of the CFPB’s goals); and Boomer Sooner (the name of the University of Oklahoma’s fight song – a nod to Professor Elizabeth Warren’s Oklahoma roots). 

The CFPB expects to hire several hundred employees over the course of 2011 and 2012. Additionally, the CFPB expects to receive staff transferred from six of the federal agencies that will be transferring consumer financial protection functions to the consumer bureau. 

Under the Dodd-Frank Act, the CFPB is funded by transfers from the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. The CFPB can request funds from the Federal Reserve that are reasonably necessary to carry out its consumer financial protection functions, but the CFPB’s funding from the Federal Reserve is capped at a pre-set percentage of the total operating expenses of the Federal Reserve, subject to an annual adjustment. To date, the CFPB has requested two funding transfers from the Federal Reserve for a total of just under $33 million. 

Check dodd-frank.com frequently for updates on the Dodd-Frank Act and other important securities law matters.