Republican members of the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit closely questioned Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Acting Deputy Director Steven Antonakes last week over the degree to which the CFPB is collecting personally identifiable information from consumers. Many of the GOP subcommittee members were quick to invoke recent scandals involving the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups and National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden as further evidence of the need to...

Sen. Mike Crapo, R-ID, the ranking member of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, has called upon the Government Accountability Office to perform a detailed examination of the CFPB’s “big” data collection efforts on consumer spending habits. “The size and scope of this data collection warrant proper government oversight to both guard consumers’ privacy and ensure that the CFPB is acting within its existing authority,” Crapo said in his letter to the GAO requesting the study. The senator also noted that the law that...

The CFPB issued a final rule last week that finalizes the April clarifications made to its ability-to-repay and mortgage servicing rules. Among other things, the final rule clarifies and amends how several factors can be used to calculate a consumer’s debt-to-income ratio. Such factors include a consumer’s employment record and income, business credit reports and other documents relating to self-employed consumers, Social Security income, and non-employment related income such as from a trust or rental property. The final...

Debt collection practices are now fully and firmly on the CFPB’s radar. Last week, the bureau warned all companies under its jurisdiction that they will be held accountable for unlawful conduct in collecting a consumer’s debts. In the first of two bulletins, the CFPB makes clear that any entity subject to the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010, whether a third-party collector or a creditor collecting its own debts, can be held accountable for any unfair, deceptive or abusive practices in collecting a consumer’s debts...

Up on Capitol Hill, it looks like push is about to become shove this week over President Barack Obama’s second nomination of Richard Cordray to continue as head of the CFPB. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, has been threatening to upend the Senate’s traditional filibuster mechanism and change the rule under which presidential nominees must receive 60 votes in order to be approved – a move long known among Washington, DC, politicos as the “nuclear option” because of the politically toxic fallout such a tactic is widely expected...

The CFPB and five other federal financial regulatory agencies issued a proposed rule last week that would create exemptions from certain appraisal requirements for a subset of higher-priced mortgage loans.Under the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, mortgages are deemed higher-priced if they are secured by a consumer’s home and have interest rates above a certain threshold. The proposed rule would exempt the following three types of HPMLs from Dodd-Frank appraisal requirements: certain loans secured by...

The Mortgage Bankers Association and the Housing Policy Council of the Financial Services Roundtable provided the CFPB with a list of priority implementation items on the ability-to-repay/ “qualified mortgage” rule’s Appendix Q, which provides the standards to make the 43 percent debt-to-income determination required by the general QM standard. “We do not believe rigid adherence to deadlines should result in a rule that is unnecessarily difficult to implement or unduly limits credit for consumers,” the trade group reps...

The CFPB’s final rule to integrate the consumer mortgage disclosures under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and the Truth in Lending Act is now projected to be issued sometime in October, a month later than had previously been indicated, according to the bureau’s semi-annual regulatory agenda update. The RESPA/TILA disclosure rule will be the last significant mortgage-related rulemaking as stipulated by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act for the foreseeable future. All of the...

The CFPB has released the first version of the 2013 Dodd-Frank Mortgage Rules Readiness Guide, which provides a set of criteria and preparation procedures for residential mortgage lenders and originators. The guide’s purposes are to help regulated entities comply with the mortgage rules, highlight key issue areas that may be closely examined during a review, and focus the industry and examiners on key elements of a compliance management system that may warrant review, modification, or other enhancement. The guide...

Five industry trade groups jointly wrote the CFPB asking for a short-term fix and offering ideas to help the industry in effectively implementing the new requirements for disclosure of homeownership counseling information to consumers at the time of loan application, which was one element of the bureau’s final rule on high-cost mortgage loans issued in January. “We urge the CFPB to adopt a temporary compliance measure that will be possible to implement by the January 2014 compliance deadline, pending steps necessary...