A broker agreed to pay roughly $275,000 to settle allegations related to pension scams in a proposed consent order with the CFPB and the Arkansas State Attorney General.

The CFPB named a high-ranking official of a student loan servicer as the bureau’s private education loan ombudsman. The move has drawn criticism from consumer groups.

A “suppressed” CFPB report showing that the nation’s largest banks were ripping off students by charging high fees has now come to light.

Seth Frotman, the former student loan ombudsman who dramatically quit the CFPB in August, has launched his own initiative to help solve the student debt crisis.

CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney is resisting outside pressure to dump the controversial political appointee who now leads the agency’s fair lending activities. Eric Blankenstein has come under fire for racially tinged blogs he posted in 2004, where he stated that using the n-word may not necessarily be racist and a great majority of hate crimes were hoaxes. Senate Democrats are pushing Mulvaney to explain how Blankenstein was hired to be head of …

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, ranking member of the House Financial Services Committee, introduced a bill to undo changes Acting CFPB Director Mick Mulvaney has made to the agency during his tenure. The legislation has no chance in the current session of Congress, but it would likely get on the fast track if Democrats win control of the House in the upcoming midterm elections. “My bill, the Consumer First Act, would reverse the harmful changes the Trump administration ...

Consumer complaints in all major categories saw double-digit declines in the third quarter compared to the second quarter, according to a new analysis by Inside the CFPB. Total gripes filed by the public with the CFPB dropped 11.4 percent from 2Q18 to 3Q18, mainly driven by an 18.9 percent sequential decline in home mortgage complaints. Complaints regarding credit cards dipped 11.4 percent, bank account problems were down 10.8 percent and ...

Changes made by the Dodd-Frank reform bill, along with other legislative proposals and government actions, would have mixed credit impact on ABS backed by student loans, said Moody’s Investors Service.

A top CFPB official in charge of protecting student borrowers stepped down from the agency in late August, blaming the leadership of Acting Director Mick Mulvaney. Seth Frotman, who was the student loan ombudsman at the agency, said in his letter of resignation the current leadership of the bureau has “turned its back on young people and their financial futures.” He added: “The bureau is now content doing the bare minimum for [consumers] while simultaneously ...

It has been more than three years since FHA introduced a new streamlined process of identifying loan defects and their severity to minimize or avoid enforcement action and hefty penalties under the False Claims Act. Despite calls by the mortgage industry to improve and clarify the process – the Single-Family Loan Quality Assessment methodology or “defect taxonomy” – the FHA has yet to make a move to meet industry demands for more detailed defect taxonomy. Contacted for an update on the defect taxonomy, a Housing and Urban Development spokesperson said simply, “Nothing to report on this.” An outgrowth of lender concern over the government’s indiscriminate use of the FCA to prosecute mortgage fraud and recover FHA losses, the defect taxonomy establishes nine categories of loan defects in loans it endorses. The nine defect categories replaced the 99 loan defect codes that were ...