Introduction: Federal Financial Privacy Laws

This section will review two federal statutes relating to financial privacy: the Right to Financial Privacy Act (the “RFPA,” 12 USC 3401 et seq.) and Title V of the Gramm-Leach- Bliley Act of 1999 (“Title V, GLB”). Title V, GLB also has implementing regulations that we will explore.

Although the RFPA is usually thought of as a restriction on government access to deposit account records, it actually applies to all financial records, on both the deposit and lending side. Title V, GLB also applies to information on both the deposit and lending side. We will look at the RFPA first and Title V of GLB and its implementing regulations second.

One final word before we start. The “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism” Act of 2001 (the USA PATRIOT Act) has some provisions relating to federal government access to account information. Since these provisions are amendments to the Bank Secrecy Act, we discuss them in detail in our section in this manual entitled “The Bank Secrecy Act and Related Requirements.” In particular, see the sections in that section entitled “Responding to a federal government request or notice” [31 CFR 103.185] and “Sharing information with federal government agencies [31 CFR 103.100].