When Congress enacted the Fair Credit Reporting Act in 1970, consumer information did not move through the real-time digital networks that now support home and vehicle purchases, mortgage underwriting, and employment decisions. Today, a consumer can authorize a credit check and receive an answer within minutes. Behind that answer, data may pass among several companies before reaching the business that uses it.
The law’s protective purpose remains essential. The system it governs has changed with the advent of new technology.
Attorney Maureen Shannon believes that gap presents an important question for business leaders and policymakers: What happens when regulation created for an earlier economy continues operating after new technology is adopted?
“In automotive finance, dealers need efficient tools, lenders need reliable information and consumers deserve accuracy, transparency and accountability,” Shannon said. “H.R. 8141 is about creating rules that are clear and balanced to support continued innovation.”
Shannon is general counsel of Open Dealer Exchange, whose businesses include 700Credit. She advises executives and boards on the spaces where regulation, operations, and consumer risk converge. Her government relations initiative supporting H.R. 8141 places a technical liability question within a larger economic debate.
Her position is not that original regulation is inherently bad. Rather, she argues that regulation should preserve its public purpose while undergoing periodic examination and amendments to reflect the environment it governs.
The Rules May Stand Still While the Economy and Technology Move
Congress enacted the FCRA to promote fairness, accuracy and privacy in the use of consumer information. Those protections matter because an inaccurate report can interfere with a person’s ability to finance a car, obtain a mortgage, rent a home or secure employment.
Technology can transform an industry while its governing statute remains relatively static. Data that once traveled through slower, more centralized processes now moves almost instantly through automated platforms. One organization may originate information, another may maintain it, a third may transmit it and a fourth may use it to make a decision.
Maureen Shannon’s regulatory strategy begins with the operating facts. Who created the information? Who controls it? Who transmitted it? Who has the authority to correct it?
A rule may have been reasonable when adopted and still produce unintended consequences decades later. Periodic review does not ignore the original protective intent; it challenges whether the law continues delivering that protection in today’s technological landscape.
Who bears the economic burden for rules that don’t keep up with the speed of the game?
The most visible regulatory costs appear on a company’s balance sheet. They arrive as expenditures on technology advancements, training, audits and regulatory oversight, and ultimately litigation. Yet the organization receiving the invoice may not bear the entire economic burden.
A company might absorb the expense through lower margins. More likely it will raise prices, enact hiring freezes, reductions in force, delayed product launches, narrowed product and services offerings, or postponed investment..
Consumers also pay via higher prices or fewer choices. A regulation may appear to protect consumers from costly harm, but laws and regulations that are poorly targeted or outdated may add expense without producing comparable value.
Employees and job seekers may feel the effects when companies redirect resources from hiring, wage increases, or innovation, toward compliance and litigation. Hiring and investment costs do belong in the economic analysis.
Entrepreneurs and startups also face a disproportionate burden. A large incumbent may have the ability to pace compliance spend across thousands of clients, whereas a nascent company may view the same fixed cost as a barrier to entry.
Competitors may also experience uneven and unintended barriers to entry. Legacy requirements can favor certain business structures when liability does not flow with the participant that controls the information or conduct. The result may reinforce an incumbent’s advantage unintentionally.
Society may bear the least visible cost. A business might abandon a product or stop testing an idea because the legal risk is too uncertain to measure. The public experiences that opportunity cost through reduced experimentation, competition, and innovation.
The central question is whether a rule still produces its intended public benefit and whether responsibility reaches the parties with the power to prevent that harm.
H.R. 8141 Puts Conduct and Control at the Center
“I focus on building processes, policy and procedures to mitigate practical risks: harm to consumers, harm to employees and financial harm to the company,” Attorney Maureen Shannon said. Her framework counts the cost of compliance alongside the cost of the harm regulation prevents.
The credit reporting system illustrates the problem that regulations don’t always follow practical risk. A furnisher supplies account information. A consumer reporting agency maintains data and produces reports. A reseller obtains, assembles and transmits information from reporting agencies. An end user relies on the report.
The consumer may see only the decision. The law must see the chain of control behind it.
“The issue we are focused on is that resellers are treated like nationwide credit reporting agencies under the statute, including TransUnion, Experian and Equifax, even though resellers do not originate or control the underlying data in the credit reports,” Shannon said. “At 700Credit, we support H.R. 8141 because it brings needed clarity to that distinction while preserving strong consumer protections for Americans.”
Reps. Mike Lawler, R-N.Y., and Josh Gottheimer, D-N.J., introduced H.R. 8141 on March 27, 2026. The House Financial Services Committee reported an amended version on Sept. 1, advancing it for possible consideration by the full House.
The reported bill would continue to require resellers to follow reasonable procedures to ensure maximum possible accuracy before transmitting report information. It would also prevent FCRA liability when a reseller accurately communicates information obtained from an upstream consumer reporting agency.
Supporters see this as a way to continue to hold resellers responsible for their procedures to ensure accuracy of the information transmitted without making them liable for errors originating in data controlled elsewhere. That position reflects Shannon’s policy principle: Accountability should correspond to conduct and control.
“Good policy starts with a clear understanding of how the industry actually works,” Shannon said. “This effort is about bringing practical insight into the regulatory conversation. The goal is to continue to protect consumers while helping lawmakers understand where legal clarity can strengthen the system for businesses, auto dealers, lenders and consumers.”
Consumers need meaningful recourse and resellers need liability placed where control resides – liability should not be assigned to a company that has no ability to correct an error it did not create.
The Modern General Counsel Must Look Beyond Compliance
A modern general counsel cannot stop at explaining a statute. Executive legal leadership requires understanding why the framework exists, how it affects operations, where risk originates, how costs move and whether the law produces its intended result.
Attorney Maureen Shannon studies an organization’s operations, goals and budget, then translates legal complexity for executives and boards. Her approach recognizes regulation’s influence on prices, hiring, investment, competition, innovation and consumer outcomes.
Government relations extends that responsibility. Companies can show policymakers who actually controls data, demonstrate which procedures prevent errors, and highlight which obligations fail to improve the outcome. Industry voices showing a regulation’s impact on businesses provides valuable insight to assess the practical application of a rule.
“The objective is to help policymakers see the full picture, including the consumer impact, the business impact and the compliance realities,” Maureen Shannon said. “When those pieces are understood together, we have a better chance of building policy that works.”
The lesson reaches beyond the FCRA and H.R. 8141. Almost every meaningful regulatory framework creates costs. The better question is whether those costs continue producing the public benefit the regulation was designed to achieve and whether its assumptions still reflect today’s economy.
Shannon says good regulation should remain durable in purpose but responsive in design. Periodic reassessment does not retreat from consumer protection. It preserves that protection as technology, business and society move forward.
