Congress should consider comprehensive reform in six areas to improve the solvency of the National Flood Insurance Program and improve resilience to flooding, according to a new report from the Government Accountability Office. The report comes in the wake of bipartisan legislation introduced last week in the Senate to reauthorize the NFIP and to broaden participation of private insurance in the flood insurance market. The program’s current authorization will expire in September this year. The GAO recommended...

As of press time, Congress passed a one-week stopgap spending measure to keep the government open through May 5, averting a looming government shutdown. The House passed H.J. Res. 99 by a vote of 373 to 30. The continuing resolution has been sent to President Trump. The continuing resolution provides lawmakers sufficient time to negotiate an omnibus spending bill. The previous spending bill was scheduled to expire at midnight, April 28, which would have resulted in a government shutdown similar to the one that paralyzed the federal government in 2013. A shutdown can cause grief for sellers and homebuyers and severely delay processing of mortgage loans if lenders cannot verify a borrower’s tax data or Social Security number. This time, however, the FHA and VA are prepared for such an eventuality, said industry observers. A 16-day government shutdown in October 2013 sent millions of ...

President Trump Friday morning signaled his intent to nominate former regulator Pamela Patenaude to be the next deputy secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. According to a bio listed on the White House website, Patenaude is president of the J. Ronald Terwilliger Foundation for Housing America’s Families. She also served as HUD assistant secretary for community, planning and development during the George W. Bush administration. Patenaude’ s nomination had been expected for some time. She is expected to play a key role in shaping housing policy in the new administration and brings to the table a depth of knowledge about the industry. HUD Secretary Ben Carson was a career brain surgeon with little in the way of housing and mortgage experience. Meanwhile, industry lobbyists contend the White House continues to vet candidates for two other ...

California remained the mother lode of mortgage insurance business in the first quarter of 2017, but a number of other major states had higher concentrations of insured business, according to a new Inside Mortgage Trends analysis. Some $12.50 billion of agency mortgages securitized during the first quarter with some form of primary MI were tied to Golden State properties, representing 58.9 percent of California’s total agency purchase-mortgage ... [Includes one data chart]

Judgment Imposed on Former President and Founder of Loan Correspondent Firm. A federal court in Chicago ordered the former president and founder of MDR Mortgage of Palatine, IL, to pay more than $10 million to the Department of Housing and Urban Development for submitting false certifications on FHA loans. The HUD Inspector General Office and the Department of Justice withheld the identity of the former bank official, who was found liable under the False Claims Act and the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act. The violations allegedly involved loans the FHA insured from 2006 through August 7, 2008, the period during which MDR submitted the allegedly false certifications. The DOJ identified 237 loans that MDR processed during the period in question. The loans defaulted and resulted in $3.4 million in claims paid by the FHA. In addition, MDR provided annual verifications to ...

The FHA will implement its new Loan Review System that features a defect taxonomy on May 15, 2017. The new system is designed to reduce potential lender liability when FHA loans go into default. The LRS will be used to manage FHA single-family loan and monitoring reviews as well as lender self-reporting of fraud, misrepresentation and other material findings. A change in the pre-endorsement loan review period from pre-closing to post-closing will also become effective on May 15. Scrutinizing loans after they close prior to endorsement for FHA insurance would ensure that loans have no material defects or material errors that could expose the lender to enforcement action or false-claim litigation and the likelihood of a hefty settlement. The defect taxonomy will help lenders identify and classify loan-level defects uncovered through individual loan reviews. Material loan defects have been narrowed down to ...

The USDA Rural Development has issued guidance instructing approved lenders to continue using the two-tiered income limit pilot for the agency’s Section 502 single-family housing programs. Launched in June last year, the pilot bands together the income limits of households with one to four members and with 5-8 members. The USDA banding process significantly increases the number of rural households that are eligible for Rural Development’s direct home loan program and the Home Repair Loan and Grant Program, the agency said. The pilot is based on the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s one-to-eight person income limits, which the department releases every year. Until last year, the USDA had been using the HUD income limits for its single- and multifamily housing programs, with the exception of the USDA’s “hold harmless” clause and the moderate-income banding allowed in the ...

Correction: There was an error in the total number reported for Home Equity Conversion Mortgage originations in 2015 in the March 17, 2017, issue of Inside FHA/VA Lending. The correct total is $16.0 billion. HUD Secretary Ben Carson Visits Dallas/Ft. Worth. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson continued his national listening tour this week in Dallas/Ft. Worth to learn more about HUD’s public housing programs. Carson embarked on a national listening tour March 15 at a Detroit high school bearing his name President Trump recently released his proposed preliminary FY 2018 budget, which showed among other things a drastic $6.2 billion reduction in funding for public housing assistance and affordable housing. Carson said the discretionary budget plan promotes fiscal responsibility at HUD by “promoting better efficiencies and ...

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac “made significant progress” in meeting the goals of their conservatorships for 2016, according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Most of the objectives set by the so-called scorecard were focused on testing new concepts or perfecting existing ones, and relatively few of them had hard targets in terms of business volume. A first strategic goal for the government-sponsored enterprises was to maintain credit availability, including increasing access to credit. There has been barely any change in the credit profile of the two GSEs’ business, and the regulator did not set any specific goals other than the affordable housing goals. And some critics would argue that the FHFA hasn’t done much to encourage more risk taking in that it has held guarantee fees steady. Last year, both Fannie and Freddie started...

With the topic of regulatory reform experiencing a resurgence of attention since the Trump administration moved into the White House, the U.S. mortgage insurance industry is calling for greater uniformity when it comes to the nitty gritty details of the ability-to-repay rule and its qualified-mortgage standard. One area of particular concern for mortgage insurers is the differences between the CFPB’s QM rule for conventional mortgages and the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s QM rule for FHA-insured mortgages. These differences include different debt-to-income caps, different formulae to calculate points and fees, and different standards for higher-cost mortgages. According to U.S. Mortgage Insurers, these differences incentivize greater reliance on programs of the U.S. government, increasing risk to taxpayers. “While consistency and ...