The Federal Reserve Office of Inspector General has a number of audits and evaluations of various aspects of the CFPB underway, and more are in the pipeline, according to the latest OIG work plan, which was updated recently. The reviews are a regular part of the Fed OIG’s responsibilities under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. The OIG has one project underway that it expects to complete sometime during the third quarter of the year, and that is an evaluation of the bureau’s Consumer...

A new study by the CFPB of different credit scoring models found that for “a substantial minority” of consumers, different scoring models gave meaningfully different results. The study found that for 73 to 80 percent of consumers, different scoring models place consumers in the same category of credit quality. Different scoring models place consumers in credit-quality categories that are off by one category 19 to 24 percent of the time. And from 1 to 3 percent of consumers are placed in categories that are two or more...

The CFPB appears to be helping borrowers feel better about taking out a mortgage over the Internet, according to a top industry technology firm. Mortgage Marvel, the online mortgage shopping service of mortgage technology firm Mortgagebot, recent conducted an examination of its application history and data to help answer the question: Is the CFPB friend or foe? “According to the data, applications are up significantly when compared to last year’s data,” said Rick Allen, senior vice president of client services...

The CFPB is playing hardball with PHH Corp. – and by extension, the rest of the mortgage lending industry – by recently refusing to amend, let alone withdraw, the civil investigative demand it issued earlier this year to the firm. “PHH’s petition to modify or set aside the Civil Investigative Demand in this matter is denied,” CFPB Director Richard Cordray said in a ruling recently. That means PHH will soon have to produce “all responsive documents, items and information within its possession, custody or control that...

Mortgage lending oversight by the CFPB and the states will likely be far more interrelated and integrated in the future than might be expected – this in response to the rulemaking and enforcement jurisdictional shake out that occurred as a result of the Dodd-Frank Act, a top regulator told industry participants at a recent mortgage lending conference. “The CFPB can’t cover everything, because of resources – it isn’t that big of an agency. But more importantly, it lacks the legislative authority to cover everything that...

The U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts recently decertified a class of borrowers who claimed that their mortgage lender violated the Equal Credit Opportunity Act and the Fair Housing Act by allowing its brokers to impose charges not related to a borrower's creditworthiness. In Barrett v. Option One Mortgage Corp., No. 08-10157, 2012 WL 4076465, the borrowers, who are African-American, claimed that the lender’s loan pricing policy had a disparate impact on African-American borrowers who...

Low house prices remained the biggest obstacle to borrowers being approved for mortgage credit in 2011, according to a new Inside the CFPB analysis of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data. Some 23.4 percent of application rejections in 2011 were because of insufficient collateral, roughly even with the 23.8 percent rate back in 2010. Although there was some firming up of house prices in a number of markets last year, the overall market continued to be under significant stress. Low house values were a bigger...

Gibbs & Bruns, the law firm representing non-agency MBS investors that reached a precedent-setting settlement with Bank of America, is now targeting Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley. The law firm’s clients issued Wells and Morgan Stanley a notice of non-performance last week identifying covenants in pooling and servicing agreements that the servicers have allegedly failed to perform. “The holders’ notice alleges that each of these failures has materially affected the rights of the certificate holders and constitutes an ongoing event of default in the servicer’s performance under the relevant PSAs,” the law firm said. Bank of America received...

The Federal Reserve is launching its aggressive new campaign to boost economic growth by gobbling up the lion’s share of new agency MBS production in a stagnant market. The volume of outstanding single-family agency MBS grew by just $651 million during the second quarter of 2012, according to a new Inside MBS & ABS analysis. At $5.382 trillion, the agency MBS market at the end of June was down 0.5 percent from the same point in 2011. Because the non-agency MBS market is...[Includes two data charts]