VA lenders may use third-party vendors to verify borrower income, employment and asset information subject to certain conditions, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. Officials issued the clarification in response to lender inquiries regarding the use of third parties to determine if a borrower qualifies for a VA loan. The agency said it would accept third-party verifications if lenders are fully responsible for verifying the accuracy of information the borrower provided in the loan application. Lenders must initiate and receive all verifications of employment and deposits, requests for credit reports, and credit information. When a real estate broker/agent or any other party requests information regarding borrower income, employment or personal assets, the lender must identify the requester as its agent and ensure that any report is returned directly to them. In addition, the lender must disclose the ...

Ginnie Mae is redefining the term “defective mortgage” to remind issuers of their obligations when confronted by a mortgage that does not have federal insurance or guarantee. The action also clarifies options issuers may consider in dealing with defective mortgages. Under their guarantee agreement with Ginnie, issuers are required to cure, buy out or replace single-family mortgages or manufactured home loans that are missing the requisite FHA insurance or VA or U.S. Department of Agriculture guarantee within 120 days after the issue date of the mortgage-backed securities. Ginnie made clear that mortgages that do not have federal insurance or guarantee by the deadline for final certification of the related pool or loan package are defective. In addition, mortgages that have been rejected by FHA, VA or USDA, or for which federal insurance or guarantee have been withdrawn, are defective as ...

FHA Announces Revised Method for Calculating Initial MIP for HECM Refis. FHA has modified the formula for calculating the initial mortgage insurance premium for Home Equity Conversion Mortgage refinances with case numbers assigned on or after Sept. 19, 2017. The formula was modified on Nov. 14, 2017. The change conforms to the final rule FHA implemented last year to strengthen the HECM program. The revised formula has been posted on FHA’s HECM page on hud.gov, FHA Connection Release Notes, dated Dec. 28, 2017. The FHAC Release Notes outline the changes and processing instructions for lenders to calculate the initial MIP for HECM refis. HUD Releases Guide to Help Borrowers and Disaster Victims Avoid Foreclosure. The Department of Housing and Urban Development has released the Homeowners Guide to Success to help struggling homeowners and ...

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-MA, has questioned whether Mick Mulvaney, the acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, inappropriately capitalized on some Inspector General con-cerns about the agency’s data security to unjustifiably freeze the bureau’s collection of consumer per-sonal information, thereby compromising examiner oversight functions.

CFPB Acting Director Mick Mulvaney has less than 200 calendar days left to occupy the director’s chair, so industry officials have been wondering what they can expect from the bureau as long as he’s in charge.According to some top compliance attorneys, the CFPB will be far less aggressive towards the industry, but hardly provide the corporate love-fest opponents of the AD fear. Laurence Platt, a partner with the Mayer Brown law firm in Washington, DC, told Inside the CFPB, “Like former Sen. George Romney’s famous prediction about the U.S. getting out of Vietnam, I expect a ‘phased withdrawal.’” The CFPB “will continue to supervise ‘covered persons,’ but, whether it is supervision or enforcement, I expect the CFPB’s use of ...

It’s possible that mortgage lenders and servicers will see the CFPB during the tenure of Acting Director Mick Mulvaney use the five-year “look back” the bureau is required to perform to make significant changes to a pair of major rulemakings: the Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act integrated disclosure rule (TRID) and the ability-to-repay rule. Donald Lampe, a partner with Morrison & Foerster law firm in Washington, DC, explained, “In Dodd-Frank, there’s a five-year required regulatory review, and there are two of those regulatory reviews that are still under advisement: one for TRID and the other for the ATR/qualified mortgage rule. “If I’m thinking about 2018, I feel pretty confident to say that those processes bear careful attention ...

As 2017 came to an end, the CFPB and other federal prudential regulators informed the industry they would implement a “good faith efforts” enforcement philosophy toward lender compliance with the new requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act that took effect Jan. 1. The CFPB in 2015 put out its rule under which financial institutions were required to collect and report new mortgage data points for loans made after Jan. 1, 2018. This past August, the bureau released a final rule that clarified some reporting requirements, increased the threshold for collecting and reporting data on home equity lines of credit for two years, and made various technical corrections. “The bureau recognizes the significant systems and operational challenges needed to meet ...

In conjunction with the interagency regulatory pledge to pursue a “good faith efforts” approach to the enforcement of new reporting requirements under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the CFPB also announced it plans to initiate a rulemaking to reconsider various aspects of the 2015 HMDA rule – most notably on issues such as the institutional and transactional coverage tests and the rule’s discretionary data points. “More specifically, the rulemaking may re-examine lending-activity criteria that determine whether institutions are required to report mortgage data,” it said. Other revisions might be made to the new requirements to report certain types of transactions. The bureau also is likely to re-assess the additional information that its HMDA rule requires beyond the new data points specified ...

Banks are increasingly worried about staying compliant with all the recent regulations they’re contending with – and the new Home Mortgage Disclosure Act requirements are still one of the biggest concerns. A new regulatory and risk management survey from Wolters Kluwer based on 2017 data registered a 3 percent increase over 2016. “The ability to maintain compliance in an environment of heightened regulatory oversight – highlighted by a spike in the number of major new regulations – remained the biggest overall compliance concern, as cited by 67 percent of respondents,” the report stated. Concerns over fair lending regulatory examinations increased by 5 percent to 46 percent, and concerns jumped 13 percent in measuring the ability to manage risk across all lines of business ...

Regardless of the outcome of the struggle for control over the CFPB in the wake of former Director Richard Cordray’s departure, lenders are being conservatively advised to maintain compliance practices that can withstand the ebb and flow of political appointees, according to one top compliance attorney.“While the Trump administration is pushing for deregulation and removing the independence of the CFPB, if it is successful, it may be risky and costly for the financial industry to abandon all of the concepts of fairness to consumers that have been embodied in the CFPB’s actions,” Maria Macoubrie, of counsel in the Kansas City, MO, office of the Stinson Leonard Street law firm, said in a recent online blog. She conceded that less ...