The House Financial Services Committee late last week passed bipartisan legislation that would provide an alternate way of defining “rural” for purposes of the CFPB’s qualified mortgage standard so a bank could make its case to the bureau as to why a jurisdiction should be fit into that category. H.R. 2672 would direct the CFPB to establish an application process under which a person who lives or does business in a state may apply to have an area designated as a rural area for the purpose of exempting certain loans from the CFPB’s ability-to-repay rule if that area has not already been designated as such by the bureau.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-TX, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, recently threatened to subpoena the CFPB to supply information on the bureau’s indirect auto lending guidance and the methodology it uses in determining whether fair lending violations exist in that space. “By refusing to disclose this information, the bureau has deliberately deprived indirect auto lenders of any meaningful way to tailor their company’s lending practices and compliance systems so as to mitigate or eliminate the fair lending risk the bureau asserts to be present,” Hensarling said in a recent letter to CFPB Director Richard Cordray.

Lender representatives privately enjoyed a bit of disparate impact schadenfreude last week when accounts surfaced in the news media that the CFPB’s own internal employee evaluations demonstrated sharp racial disparities. Citing confidential agency data it obtained, American Banker reported that the bureau’s own managers have shown distinctly different patterns in how they rate employees of different races, with white employees ranking distinctly better than minorities in performance reviews used to grant raises and bonuses. Overall, whites were twice as likely to receive the agency’s top grade last year than were African-American or Hispanic employees, the newspaper said.

CFPB Deputy Director Steve Antonakes isn’t toning down his antagonistic stance towards mortgage servicers. Speaking at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition Annual Conference in Washington, DC, last week, Antonakes rattled the bureau’s sabre at the market sector again, saying, “We expect servicers to pay exceptionally close attention to servicing transfers and they should understand that we will as well. “Servicing transfers where the new servicers are not honoring existing permanent or trial loan modifications will not be tolerated,” he added. “Struggling borrowers being told to pay incorrect higher amounts because of the failure to honor an in-process loan modification – and then being punished with foreclosure for their inability to pay the incorrect amounts – will not be tolerated.”

World Acceptance Corp., one of the largest small-loan lenders in the U.S., received a civil investigative demand from the CFPB last week, the company disclosed in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The CID states, in part, that “[t]he purpose of this investigation is to determine whether finance companies or other unnamed persons have been or are engaging in unlawful acts or practices in connection with the marketing, offering or extension of credit ….” The probe is also being undertaken “to determine whether bureau action to obtain legal or equitable relief would be in the public interest,” the filing said.

Fitch Ratings just released its finalized criteria for analyzing loans securing non-agency residential mortgage-backed securities under the qualified mortgage standard and ability-to-repay rule. Fitch said it will require more credit enhancement to loans that do not benefit from the QM safe harbor protection. Second, credit enhancement will be based on pool probability of default, which projects the maximum number of borrower challenges, as Fitch expects borrowers will only make a claim that the lender violated the rule as a defense to foreclosure.

Coping with the potential for fair lending violations in the new qualified-mortgage world is a source of high anxiety for many compliance professionals in mortgage finance. But Gregory Imm, chief compliance officer and director of community affairs and fair lending and responsible banking at Fifth Third Bank, recently shared some lesser-known considerations that should increase industry representatives’ confidence in their compliance and readiness. Speaking to participants in a recent webinar sponsored by Inside Mortgage Finance, an affiliated publication, Imm said the first area is measurement. “Institutions need to establish key performance risk indicators of what should be measured, and not what is convenient to measure,” he said. “I say ‘convenient’ because those are the activities that are easy to measure because you have the data at your fingertips.”

Regulators have been paying closer attention to the mortgage servicing practices of the large nonbank servicers, but they’re not the bad actors their critics make them out to be, analysts at Compass Point Research & Trading concluded recently. “Overall, we believe there is some merit to the operational concerns about portfolio growth for the special servicers, but the longer-term track record of the special servicers is strong and the near-term operational issues likely will be temporary,” the Compass Point team said.The analysts compared the servicing practices between the largest bank and nonbank mortgage servicers.

Three lender-related trade groups told the CFPB they are opposed to the wholesale extension of the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act to first-party creditors using the bureau’s rulemaking authority to prohibit unfair, deceptive or abusive acts and practices. Commenting on the bureau’s advance notice of proposed rulemaking on debt collection practices, the American Bankers Association, the Consumer Bankers Association, and the Financial Services Roundtable said they support the CFPB’s decision to initiate a rulemaking in the space, given the massive consumer debt market now stands at $11.8 trillion and the importance debt collection has for credit availability.

The latest budget issued by the CFPB projects an 8.3 percent increase from $538.7 million in fiscal year 2013 to $583.4 million in fiscal year 2015. The programs with the most significant increases in funding are consumer response operations, up 84.8 percent over that time, and supervision, enforcement and fair lending, which will rise 65.6 percent. The emphasis on consumer response and enforcement is also reflected in the number of full-time employees (FTE) by program.