Federal Reserve press conference, 2015-03-18 — Chair Janet Yellen

Question (Craig Torres, Bloomberg): Madame Chair, I’d like to preface this by saying, I do believe you stand for accountability. And—so, recently, a bunch of us, we’re in a room over there, there was a police guard outside, and your staff had taken our cell phones, and they controlled the Internet in the room—all this to guard the security of the FOMC statement. If one of us had leaked it, we would lose our jobs. Surely there would be a prosecution, and my friends here in the press would certainly have a banner day with that story. There was a leak in the FOMC. We don’t know what happened. I’ve asked, I can’t get an answer. And now Congress is asking. Both parties want to know. I’m not going to ask about the IG’s probe—I understand that’s an active case now, suddenly, after two years of just sitting there. But I would like to ask what you’ve found at the Board. You weren’t Chairman then, you were Vice Chair, I believe. So what answers do you have, and are you going to respond to Congress?
Answer: So, let me say that the Committee and I, personally, take very seriously our responsibility to safeguard confidential information. We have a set of policies and procedures that are in place that we’re to follow if we believe that there have been leaks of confidential information. And this is something that doesn’t occur very often, but if it does occur, we follow those procedures. It has been reported that our Inspector General is engaged in a review at this time of this matter, and in light of that ongoing review, I’m not going to get into details, but let me just say that we welcome that review and are looking forward to its conclusions. With respect to Congress, congressional inquiries—we have arranged to brief members of Congress who’ve asked about this, and we’ll certainly cooperate in trying to provide them the information that they seek.