The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau announced the hiring of two former Obama administration officials as the agency's supervision and enforcement chiefs.
CFPB Director Rohit Chopra on Friday named Lorelei Salas, who was director of strategic enforcement in the Department of Labor from 2007 to 2011, as assistant director for supervision policy and acting assistant director for supervision examinations.
The bureau also made official the appointment of
Both posts report to the head of the division of supervision, enforcement and fair lending, which is known as SEFL. According to an internal staff memo obtained by American Banker, former acting CFPB Director Dave Uejio will oversee SEFL temporarily while he is under Senate consideration for an appointment at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Salas is a former commissioner for New York City's Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, where she oversaw hundreds of inspectors, attorneys, and staff from 2016 to 2021. She previously had been the legal director at Make the Road New York, a Brooklyn, New York, nonprofit that provides immigration, housing and legal services.
Salas also served as director of legal services at Catholic Migration Services, a Brooklyn nonprofit provider of legal services that is affiliated with Catholic Charities of Brooklyn and Queens and the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn.
Before working in the Obama administration, she spent five years as an assistant attorney general in the New York State Attorney General’s Office, working in the litigation and labor bureaus.
Before her legal career, Salas worked as a private-sector auditor investigating companies’ compliance with their own codes of conduct and with federal and state workplace laws.
He served two stints at the Justice Department over nearly 10 years. From 2010 to 2014 he was acting deputy assistant attorney general, overseeing the division’s fair housing, fair lending and employment enforcement programs, and before that he was special counsel for fair lending. He was a trial attorney in the DOJ’s civil rights division from 1998 to 2004.
Jean Chang will serve as acting chief operating officer, according to the internal memo from CFPB Chief of Staff Jan Singelmann. Chang most recently was the acting deputy chief operating officer and chief of staff for operations. She has worked at the CFPB since 2014.
In addition, Seth Frotman will serve as acting general counsel in addition to senior advisor. Frotman most recently served as executive of the Student Borrower Protection Center. He had been the CFPB’s student loan ombudsman for three years.
