The month of July may very well be do-or-die time for policymakers to decide whether they should delay implementation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s new reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. “Regulators, and particularly members of Congress, don’t understand that if you’re going to delay the rule based on the technology implications of it, you really have to make a decision fairly far out before the rule becomes effective,” said Richard Andreano, a partner with the Ballard Spahr law firm in Washington, DC. He gave his remarks during a panel discussion at the American Bankers Association’s annual regulatory compliance conference, held in Orlando last week. In his judgement, July is...

Lenders originating nonprime mortgages have a number of different programs for borrowers shut out of the agency market, including an emphasis on reduced documentation requirements. Deephaven Mortgage is among the lenders that have pooled newly originated nonprime home loans into mortgage-backed securities. The company’s recent $250.13 million MBS included a variety of loans, largely focused on non-qualified mortgages. Some 82.6 percent of the loans in the deal were...

Weeks after the Trump administration banned the practice, the Senate Judiciary Committee is looking into whether the Obama administration used mortgage-related settlement funds to funnel money to political organizations that Congress deliberately defunded. In a recent letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-IA, chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, revived a standing request to the Department of Justice for a list of all settlement agreements reached during the previous administration that involved alleged payments to partisan community organizations. He gave the agency until June 28 to respond to his request. Specifically, Grassley asked...

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s integrated-disclosure rule has been in effect for more than 18 months now, and industry compliance professionals still have a number of questions in need of answers as they await the issuance of the so-called TRID 2.0 rule from the agency. The rule had been expected in the first quarter of 2017, but to date, not a peep has been uttered by the agency as to the cause of the delay or when lenders might expect the final rule. The Treasury Department recently issued...

In a new report mandated by the Trump administration, per Executive Order 13772, the Treasury Department slammed the CFPB on multiple counts and called for an overhaul on how the bureau is managed. The Treasury’s perspective was summed up succinctly: “The CFPB was created to pursue an important mission, but its unaccountable structure and unduly broad regulatory powers have led to regulatory abuses and excesses. The CFPB’s approach to enforcement and rulemaking has hindered consumer choice and access to credit, limited innovation, and imposed undue compliance burdens, particularly on small institutions.” The report then detailed a number of more specific criticisms, as follows. “The bureau’s structure renders it unaccountable to the American people,” it began. Also, the CFPB’s substantive authority ...

The Treasury Department’s report on reforming financial regulation in the U.S. blames rules ushered in under the Dodd-Frank Act – and promulgated by the CFPB – for tight credit conditions in the mortgage market. “While Dodd-Frank and the ATR/QM [ability to repay/qualified mortgage] rule were not intended to eliminate markets for loans that did not meet the QM standards, the reality is that the vast majority of lenders remain unwilling to make loans that do not meet those standards, eliminating access to mortgages for many creditworthy borrowers,” Treasury wrote in the 142-page report. (At best, $3 billion to $4 billion in nonprime/non-QM mortgages might be originated this year out of total industrywide originations of $1.5 trillion.) The administration took aim at Appendix ...

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 ...

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...

The Treasury Department said the so-called GSE patch gives Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac an unfair advantage in the mortgage market, and it recommended eliminating this exception to the qualified-mortgage rule. In a financial regulations report released this week, the Treasury detailed a host of executive actions and regulatory changes that it believes can immediately stimulate economic growth, increase capital access and protect taxpayers. Adjusting and clarifying the ability-to-repay/qualified mortgage rule and phasing out the GSE patch are among those changes listed. The GSE patch, created under Dodd-Frank, allows GSE eligible loans to qualify for QM status, even if the DTI exceeds the standard 43 percent ratio.