Democratic lawmakers recently introduced a bill to both chambers of Congress to repeal the partial exemption granted last year to smaller institutions from certain mortgage reporting requirements.

In yet another effort for deregulation following the controversial payday lending rule proposal, the CFPB is likely to propose changes to the mortgage disclosure rule, according to industry observers.

CFPB Updates Reference Chart for 2019 HMDA Data Collection; CFPB Sued for Withholding Records on its Decision to Stop Military Lending Act Supervision; CFPB Clarifies Participation in "Disclosure Sandbox."

The CFPB has restricted public disclosure of certain mortgage data collected by lenders in 2018 under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act.

With financial institutions set to report mortgage disclosure data collected in 2018 to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, attorneys are concerned that it may lead to an increase in fair lending investigations and enforcement actions by government agencies.

Former CFPB Director Loses in the Ohio Governor’s Race. Former CFPB Director Richard Cordray lost in the Ohio governor’s race last week. Republican Attorney General Mike DeWine led a GOP sweep of statewide nonjudicial offices. In his campaign, Cordray boasted of his record reining in Wall Street during his tenure at the CFPB. He worked as the CFPB director from its inception until 2017, when he quit to run for governor of the Buckeye State [Includes four briefs] ...

The American Bankers Association said many questions about new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act reporting remain unanswered and proposed guidance from the CFPB won’t give lenders sufficient legal protection. The CFPB amended the HMDA rule in 2015, implementing expanded data collection fields specifically mandated by the Dodd-Frank Act along with some based on the bureau’s discretionary authority. The net result expanded the required ...

The CFPB late last week issued a rule to clarify partial HMDA exemptions for small financial institutions ushered in under the Dodd-Frank reform act. The Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, signed into law in May, exempts depositories – including credit unions – that originated fewer than 500 closed-end mortgages or 500 open-end lines of credit in each of the two preceding calendar years from certain expanded reporting ...

CFPB Announces HMDA File Format Verification Tool and New 2017 Dataset. The CFPB earlier this month released the 2018 File Format Verification Tool (FFVT) which tests whether HMDA reporters’ files meet certain formatting requirements needed to submit data to the HMDA platform. Specifically, the FFVT will test whether the file is pipe-delimited, has the proper number of data fields, and has data fields formatting as integers, where necessary ... [Includes three briefs]

The denial rate on mortgage applications calculated solely from Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data provides a misleading measure of credit availability, according to industry analysts. Analysts from the Urban Institute and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. authored a paper suggesting that the attributes of loan applicants should be taken into consideration when determining denial rates. “Higher denial rates can be the result of either a tighter credit environment or an increase in ...