The House Financial Services Committee recently threatened to file contempt charges against CFPB Director Richard Cordray over the agency’s alleged failure to comply with the committee’s request for documentation related to the bureau’s response to the Wells Fargo scandal involving the creation of unauthorized customer accounts. “In response to the committee’s records request, the CFPB did not produce a single internal record related to its Wells Fargo branch sales practice investigation,” the HFSC staff said in a report. Over the course of six months, the bureau only produced 1,010 pages of records, “comprised almost entirely of records easily obtainable” from Wells or the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, it added. After six months of the CFPB’s “refusal to ...
The American Bankers Association recently detailed a handful of major concerns it continues to have with the approach federal regulators take toward fair lending. The first such concern it listed in a new white paper sent to the Treasury Department is the expanded use of the disparate-impact concept. “Federal agencies responsible for ensuring compliance with national fair lending laws have in the last few years aggressively applied a controversial legal theory, disparate impact, to brand banks with violations of fair lending rules,” said the ABA. Under the disparate-impact theory, regulators rely heavily, sometimes solely, on statistical sketches to justify lawsuits or other enforcement actions, it added. “In doing so, since June 2015 they have largely ignored the analytical framework established ...
The information the CFPB collects and reports on consumer complaints offers lenders a tremendous resource in terms of abiding by the letter and the spirit of the bureau’s numerous rules, according to some top compliance professionals. “The CFPB’s annual report on complaints really is an incredible source of information,” said Barbara Boccia, senior director at Wolters Kluwer, during a presentation early last week at the American Bankers Association’s annual regulatory compliance conference in Orlando. “First, it really is a lot of information. Also, the way they structure the information that they receive is instructive,” she said. “You really want to make sure you are structuring your [complaint] information the same way, in terms of what they are looking at – for ...
One of the top concerns among compliance professionals is the seeming inevitable conflict that the CFPB’s amendments to its mortgage servicing rules will have with various state laws – in particular, the possibility that compliance with one may put the servicer out of compliance with the other. That was one of the key takeaways from a break-out session early last week at the American Bankers Association’s annual regulatory compliance conference in Orlando. “One issue that comes up fairly frequently has to do with what a servicer should do when there is a conflict between state and federal law. We’ve seen this come up especially when it comes to the various early intervention notices that servicers have to send to delinquent borrowers,” ...
Industry compliance officers, trade group representatives and legal experts at the American Bankers Association’s regulatory compliance conference, held in Orlando last week, expressed mixed sentiments about whether the CFPB ought to delay the effective date of the new requirements it is ushering in under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. They were responding to the suggestion of such a delay made by the Treasury Department in its recent report as per President Trump’s Executive Order 13772. “Obviously, a delay has to be for at least a year because the nature of HMDA is such that you can’t delay for six months,” Rodrigo Alba, the ABA’s senior vice president and senior regulatory counsel for mortgage finance, told an audience during a working ...
More than 68 percent of mortgage defects reported in 2016 involved TRID-related and/or loan package documentation issues, according to the latest mortgage quality control industry trends report from ACES Risk Management (ARMCO). “In 2016, the entire lending industry was impacted by the enhanced regulatory oversight of the CFPB as the long-awaited implementation of TRID was fully realized,” the report noted. “Many lenders spent the better part of the first quarter addressing the multitude of mistakes associated with TRID.” In some instances, this produced loans that could not be sold on the secondary market. “A wave of corrective action followed, and soon the sheer amount of resources directed at solving these issues became overwhelming for many lenders,” ARMCO added. The top...
House Fires Shot Across CFPB’s Bow, Passes Financial CHOICE Act. The GOP-controlled House of Representatives followed through on the majority’s often expressed intention to largely eviscerate the CFPB, passing H.R. 10, the Financial CHOICE Act, the Republican alternative to the Dodd-Frank Act. The measure passed on a vote of 233-186. All eyes now turn to the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, where Mike Crapo, R-ID, will play a pivotal role in Republican efforts to roll back the bureau. “Today’s passage of the Financial CHOICE Act is a significant and thoughtful effort to improve our financial regulatory system,” Crapo said after the vote. “Many of the provisions in this legislation are responses to the failures and consequences of Dodd-...
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