The Department of Housing and Urban Development is increasing its focus on tighter underwriting with actions against pregnancy discrimination in home mortgages. The department recently charged Mortgage Guaranty Insurance Corp., PNC Mortgage and others for allegedly refusing to provide mortgage insurance on a Pennsylvania loan unless the borrower returned to work from maternity leave. The FHA requires approved lenders to review a borrower’s income to determine his or her ability to repay the mortgage. However, lenders are prohibited from inquiring about future maternity leave. According to HUD’s complaint, MGIC notified ...

Mortgage compliance experts are bracing for up to 10,000 pages of new Dodd-Frank Act regulations that will make mortgage lending exponentially more difficult, according to industry officials at this week’s regulatory compliance conference sponsored by the American Bankers Association. “Dodd-Frank is going to increase the compliance burden, the risk of non-compliance and the cost of mortgage lending,” said David Kelly, executive vice president in charge of loan operations for FirstBank Data Corp. The new regulatory environment will feature...

Top servicers flagged for their faulty foreclosure practices will have an extra month to submit their mitigation plans, although federal regulators continue to bear down on the industry and are starting to withhold loss mitigation incentive payments from some companies. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the Office of Thrift Supervision this week said they will give 12 servicers subject to consent orders extra time to submit “comprehensive action plans” that detail the financial resources the bank will commit to...

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has issued an interim final regulation with a request for comments on changes to its existing Freedom of Information Act regulations. In its notice, published in the May 23 Federal Register, the FHFA said it is updating its existing FOIA regulations to include the FHFA Office of Inspector General. The FHFA-OIG did not yet exist when the Finance Agency’s original FOIA regulations were issued in 2009.

In light of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s federal conservatorship status and the resulting control by the Treasury Department, the two GSEs are “effectively part of the government” and their operations should be reflected in the federal budget, according to the Congressional Budget Office.CBO has concluded that using a fair-value approach to estimate Fannie and Freddie’s subsidy costs is the best way to give Congress and taxpayers the most accurate accounting information.

Although federal regulators this week gave the industry more time to comment on their controversial proposal on risk retention in non-agency MBS and ABS transactions, some industry experts have already suggested that the concept fails to address its fundamental purpose of strengthening deal quality by aligning the interests of securitizers and investors. Risk retention is an intellectually appealing idea, but it’s not clear that it provides...

Bank executives expect it will be a tall order for their firms to address the various tax implications of the Dodd-Frank Act, as well as the Basel III liquidity standards, particularly with regard to securitizations, according to a recent survey by audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG. KPMG reported that 48 percent of respondents said their firms were still trying to figure out the tax implications of Dodd-Frank and Basel III, while 49 percent said...

Some imprecise language in last year’s financial reform legislation has thrust the Federal Reserve into a quandary on how best to define “qualified mortgage” under the new law, according to some top industry lawyers and market analysts...

Last week’s ground-breaking settlements between U.S. bank regulators and many of the top mortgage servicers in the country may bring some certainty to the industry about the ultimate resolution of the foreclosure crisis still gripping parts of the nation, but it’s also likely to lead to higher costs and more labor-intensive compliance efforts, according to a consensus of industry analysts...

Two of the mortgage lending industry’s top service provides, Mortgage Electronic Registration Systems and Lender Processing Services, will not be continuing business as usual, now that federal banking regulators have announced consent orders with the two firms that call for a substantial amount of remediation of significant institutional weaknesses...