Michael Levitis, principal of the Mission Settlement Agency (a debt-settlement company), was slapped with a nine-year prison sentence and ordered to pay $2.2 million in restitution and a fine of $15,000 after pleading guilty to several charges brought in response to the CFPB’s first publicly announced criminal referral to the U.S. Department of Justice last year. Levitis pled guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit mail fraud and wire fraud, and another count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. He has been ordered to surrender for service of his sentence on Feb. 23, 2015, at an institution to be determined by the state Bureau of Prisons. Upon release from imprisonment, Levitis will be on supervised release for a term ...

Last week, the CFPB asked the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to enter a consent order requiring Premier Consulting Group to pay a civil penalty of $69,075 – accusing the firm of charging consumers illegal upfront fees for debt-settlement services they never received – and to take other steps to prevent future legal violations. That sum represents the amount of advance fees the company took from consumers who did not have any debt settled, according to the bureau. Included in the CFPB’s legal action was the law office of Michael Lupolover. Both firms are based in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Premier Consulting “took advantage of consumers in financial distress, charging tens of thousands of dollars for services they ...

Toyota Motor Credit Corp., the captive finance arm of Toyota, recently revealed that it has received a letter from the CFPB and the Justice Department alleging that certain practices related to discretionary dealer markup resulted in discriminatory lending aimed at minorities and low-income borrowers. In a recent Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, TMCC said the agencies have requested certain information about the company’s purchases of auto finance contracts from dealers as well as related discretionary pricing practices. “On Nov. 25, 2014, we received from the agencies a letter alleging that such practices resulted in discriminatory pricing of loans to certain borrowers in contravention of applicable laws, and informing us that they are prepared to initiate an ...

The tug of war between the CFPB and the Morgan Drexen firm took an unusual twist late last month, with the company firing a public relations salvo in the form of an open letter to attorneys nationwide, calling on them to “stand up against the CFPB and defend access to affordable legal services for disadvantaged Americans.” “Affordable legal care in America is under fire by the CFPB, and without quick and decisive action, the legal support that millions of Americans need may be eliminated,” the firm’s letter said. “It is vital that we, as an industry, stand together to draw a hard line and demand that our representatives in Congress rein in a bureau that has specifically not been given ...

The U.S. Supreme Court plans to hear oral argument on Jan. 21, 2015, in the disparate-impact case, Texas Department of Housing and Community Affairs v. The Inclusive Communities Project, Inc. The fundamental legal issue in the case is whether disparate-impact claims are cognizable under the Fair Housing Act. As far as the facts of the case go, the dispute involves a statutory challenge to the allocation of low-income housing tax credits. The TDHCA distributes the tax credits associated with the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program throughout Texas. The ICP is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit that works to place low-income, mostly African-American Section 8 tenants in Dallas’s more affluent and largely white suburban neighborhoods. The ICP brought suit against TDHCA back in ...

Industry representatives might be interested to know that the Treasury Department’s Office of Financial Research is working with the CFPB on some key regulatory initiatives. For instance, the OFR is providing technical support to the CFPB and other regulators to create a universal mortgage loan identifier to promote transparency, data aggregation, comparability, and analysis in the home mortgage market, the office said in a new report. The Dodd-Frank Act authorized the bureau to collect more data about individual mortgage loans and to mandate that entities reporting data under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act provide a universal loan identifier for each loan or application that they are required to report. The OFR published a working paper on this subject in late ...

The FHA has announced loan limits in 2015 for high- and low-cost areas, virtually unchanged from the loan limits in effect through the end of the year. The new limits will take effect on Jan. 1, 2015. The maximum loan limits in high-cost housing areas will remain the same as the 2014 level of $625,500. The current standard loan limit in lower-cost areas will also remain unchanged at $271,050. The mortgage loan limits for Home Equity Conversion Mortgage loans will continue to have a maximum claim amount of ...

The FHA and Ginnie Mae will share in the record-setting $16.7 billion settlement between Bank of America, the Department of Justice and certain other federal agencies and six states to resolve claims related to mortgage fraud and toxic mortgage-backed securities. The FHA will receive approximately $800 million and an undisclosed amount for consumer relief from BofA. The bank was accused of falsely certifying poorly underwritten loans for FHA insurance, resulting in huge losses for the agency. It is unclear how much Ginnie Mae’s share would be from the settlement. “As a direct endorser of FHA-insured loans, Bank of America performs a critical role in home lending,” said U.S. Attorney Loretta Lynch for the Eastern District of New York during the announcement of the global settlement in August. “In obtaining a payment of $800 million and sweeping relief for troubled homeowners, we have not ...

State-regulated lenders and servicers will be required to report new information on servicing and originations to regulators beginning in the first quarter of 2015. Lenders weren’t able to win many concessions from the Conference of State Bank Supervisors, which proposed reporting changes for the Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System & Registry’s Mortgage Call Reports in October. The State Regulatory Registry, a subsidiary of the CSBS that operates the NMLS on behalf of state regulators, positioned the reporting requirements as part of an effort to reduce regulatory burden for lenders. “A goal of the MCR is...

The multi-agency final rule implementing the Dodd-Frank Act appraisal-related amendments to the Financial Institutions Reform, Recovery, and Enforcement Act is expected sometime this month, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s semi-annual regulatory agenda. The amendments made by Dodd-Frank to FIRREA require new minimum requirements to be applied by states in the registration, reporting and supervision of appraisal management companies (AMCs). They further require implementing regulations for new quality control standards for automated valuation models (AVMs) “designed to ensure a high level of confidence in the estimates produced by the valuation models.” The pending regulations also are...