The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has put out some proposed guidance on the controversial matter of how much of the expanded data collected under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act will be made available to the public. The bureau did not announce any delay in the effective date of the revamped HMDA rule, slated to take effect Jan. 1, 2018. First, the agency wants to exclude several of the loan-level data points from public disclosure, including the universal loan identifier, the application date, the date the financial institution took action and the property address. Also, it would shield the borrower’s credit score, the mortgage loan originator ID number and any result generated by an automated underwriting system. Additionally, the CFPB is...

Trade groups representing smaller mortgage lenders are asking the Trump administration for targeted regulatory relief for smaller independent mortgage bankers. In a joint letter to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin this week, the Community Home Lenders Association and the Community Mortgage Lenders of America urged the administration to back legislation that would exempt independent mortgage lenders from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s supervision, enforcement and third-party vendor audits. Support is also being sought for CFPB administrative action to provide such targeted relief. In June, Treasury issued...

With speculation mounting that CFPB Director Richard Cordray could be out the door as early as the Labor Day weekend, the CFPB late last week announced it is amending the 2015 updates to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act rule. The bureau has temporarily changed reporting requirements for banks and credit unions that issue home-equity lines of credit, and clarified the information that financial institutions are required to collect and report about their mortgage lending. Under the rules that are scheduled to take effect January 2018, financial institutions would have been required under HMDA to report HELOCs if they made 100 such loans in each of the last two years. The final rule issued this past Thursday increases that threshold to ...

The CFPB and the other members of the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council last week issued new examiner transaction testing guidelines for all financial institutions that report under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The rules will apply to the examination of HMDA data collected starting in 2018 and reported beginning in 2019. The guidelines eliminate the file-error resubmission threshold under which a financial institution would have to correct and resubmit its entire Loan Application Register (LAR) if the total number of sample files with at least one error reached or exceeded a certain threshold, the bureau said. They also establish allowable tolerances for certain data fields for the purpose of counting errors toward the field-error resubmission threshold.Additionally, they provide ...

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council this week issued new examiner transaction testing guidelines for all financial institutions that report under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. The rules will apply to the examination of HMDA data collected starting in 2018 and reported starting in 2019. The guidelines eliminate...

Mortgage lending representatives told the CFPB they support its proposal to temporarily increase the institutional and transactional coverage thresholds for open-end lines of credit under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act. However, more needs to be done along those lines, they said in comment letters filed at the end of last month. Under the CFPB’s HMDA rules scheduled to take effect in January 2018, financial institutions are generally required to report HELOCs if they made 100 such loans in each of the past two years. Under the proposal released early last month, the bureau would increase that threshold to 500 loans through calendar years 2018 and 2019 in order to give the agency the time to consider whether to make a ...

The clock is ticking on the effective date of a host of new data collection and reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, and mortgage lenders are still waiting for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to complete some components of the rule necessary for full compliance. For this reason, the regulator should delay mandatory compliance much later than the scheduled January 2018 implementation date, industry trade groups said. “Although we greatly appreciate the CFPB’s work to facilitate implementation of this major data collection and reporting rule, the CFPB’s regulatory process and technological framework for this rule are still incomplete,” lender representatives said in a letter this week to the agency. Proposed amendments have not been finalized...

A handful of top industry trade groups again wrote to CFPB Director Richard Cordray urging him to delay implementation of the bureau’s new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act rules. “Although we greatly appreciate the CFPB’s work to facilitate implementation of this major data collection and reporting rule, the CFPB’s regulatory process and technological framework for this rule are still incomplete,” said the organizations. For one thing, proposed amendments to the rule are not yet finalized. “Moreover, the HMDA data reporting portals, geocoding tools, data validation, and rule edits are not yet issued,” the groups added. “All of these items are needed to ensure compliant business process and systems changes by the effective date.” Additionally, the CFPB has not yet initiated a ...

With the new data collection and reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act now less than six months away, anxious industry calls for regulatory relief met with some limited success recently, while others continue to urge a broader extension of the implementation period. Late last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau relented somewhat, proposing to temporarily ease HMDA reporting requirements for lenders that make a small number of home equity lines of credit. The agency proposed raising the threshold for HELOC reporting from 100 loans to 500 loans, starting in January 2018. Officials acknowledged they may have...

Last week, the CFPB issued a proposal to temporarily ease reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act for small banks and credit unions that issue home-equity lines of credit – but based on the number of such loans, not asset size of the institution. Under the CFPB’s HMDA rules scheduled to take effect in January 2018, financial institutions are generally required to report HELOCs if they made 100 such loans in each of the past two years. Under the proposal released last week, the bureau would increase that threshold to 500 loans through calendar years 2018 and 2019 in order to give the consumer regulator the time to consider whether to make a permanent adjustment. “Home-equity lines of credit worsened ...