The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Office of the Inspector General has finalized settlements with two direct endorsement lenders to resolve allegations of violating FHA underwriting requirements. Golden First Mortgage Corp. and Group One Mortgage agreed to pay a total of $36.41 million to the federal government in reparation for losses incurred by the FHA on the defaulted loans. Based in Great Neck, NY, Golden First, a privately held company, and its owner/president, David Movtady, allegedly falsely certified to FHA and HUD that the loans the company endorsed for insurance met all FHA requirements. This went on from 2002 through 2010, the OIG alleged. The OIG accused the company and Movtady of violating the False Claims Act, which prohibits acts to defraud the federal government and which has been instrumental in ...

The Department of Veterans Affairs is updating its residual-income tables, with an eye to publishing revised guidelines in 2016. The last time the VA calculated and published the residual-income guidelines was in the 1990s, and a lot has changed since then, according to Mike Frueh, director of the VA Home Loan Guaranty program. Residual income is the monthly household income that remains after all primary obligations – mortgage and escrows, car payments, credit card bills, student loans, among others – have been paid. VA will not back a loan to a vet or service member if they do not meet or exceed residual-income requirements. The residual-income threshold varies by family size, borrower location and other compensating factors. Calculations for residual income vary for the Northwest Region, Midwest Region, South Region and West Region of the country. Frueh said they are ...

Beginning June 27, the FHA will require electronic appraisals for single-family forward and reverse mortgages to be delivered through an online electronic submission portal prior to endorsement. The Electronic Appraisal Delivery (EAD) portal is a web-based platform that would allow paperless submissions of single-family home loan appraisals, cutting down loan processing time significantly. FHA lenders and their authorized representatives can access the EAD portal by using electronic credentials and showing they are ready to use the new technology. Only appraisals that are compliant with FHA appraisal and data delivery guidelines can be uploaded to the portal. Lenders will be notified of a successful upload or if they need to correct and resubmit an appraisal. Once an appraisal is successfully submitted to the portal, FHA Connection will pull EAD appraisal data and pre-fill certain data fields in the ...

Fannie Mae Updates Reverse Mortgage Loan Servicing Manual. Fannie Mae has updated its reverse mortgage servicing manual with changes and clarifications to policies pertaining to Home Equity Conversion Mortgages. For HECMs, Fannie now requires servicers to place a real estate-owned hazard insurance policy upon completion of a foreclosure sale. It also outlined servicers’ responsibilities regarding the documentation and cancellation of REO hazard insurance claims; reimbursement of REO hazard insurance premiums; and remittance of insurance loss proceeds. The revised policy changes must be implemented no later than April 1, 2015. House Democrats Reintroduce Housing Finance Reform Bill. Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee have introduced legislation that would provide private and government risk-share coverage to all mortgages, create a ...

More than a dozen industry organizations asked the CFPB last week to implement a “restrained enforcement and liability” or “grace period” through the end of 2015 for those seeking to comply in good faith with its integrated disclosure rule after its August 1, 2015, effective date. “There are ... situations – such as what will occur if a closing cannot go forward on schedule because of occurrences outside the control of the parties – that are not addressed by the regulation which still require additional guidance,” the collection of 16 trade groups said in a joint letter to CFPB Director Richard Cordray. “We would like to use this grace period to identify pain points with stakeholders and then meet with bureau staff ...

The changes the CFPB wants to make to its 2013 mortgage servicing rules under the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act and the Truth in Lending Act got a mixed reception from the mortgage industry. The proposed rule was issued in mid-December, and the public comment period closed last week. The proposed amendments cover nine primary topics: successors in interest, definition of delinquency, requests for information, force-placed insurance, early intervention, loss mitigation, prompt payment crediting, periodic statements, and small servicer issues. The Independent Community Bankers of America was pleased with the bureau’s proposed amendment to the small servicer definition that will permit a small servicer to service, for a fee, mortgage loans that are seller-financed transactions subject to certain limitations. ...

Credit unions support a CFPB proposal that would let them off the hook for one year when it comes to submitting their credit card agreements to the bureau while the agency works to develop a more streamlined and automated electronic submission system. Other requirements, including card issuers’ obligations to post currently-offered agreements on their own Web sites, would remain unaffected by the proposed rule, which was issued in February. Currently, card issuers are required to send agreements to the bureau manually through e-mail. The CFPB intends to come up with a new system through which card issuers would be able to upload agreements directly to the bureau’s database and eliminate the process of e-mail submissions. Among the supporters was the ...

It looks like some of the biggest mortgage lenders in the nation will be closing their loans themselves largely without closing agents, once the CFPB’s integrated disclosure rule kicks in Aug. 1, 2015, one top vendor representative revealed recently. And that might put the big banks at a competitive advantage vis-à-vis their nonbank rivals. “Because this is a paradigm shift, and because the liability is staying on the lender side – both in terms of the accuracy of the disclosure and in the timing – we’ve heard some of the bigger lenders are going to close the loans themselves instead of using settlement agents,” John Vong, CEO of ComplianceEase, told Inside the CFPB recently. “For some of the banks, they have already ...

The CFPB’s latest Supervisory Highlights report identified a number of issues observed during examinations related to mortgage origination, fair lending, consumer reporting, debt collection, and deposits. “In one or more examinations, examiners found that branch managers were loan originators and owners of related marketing services entities,” the report said. Examiners “found instances of improperly allocated expenses on branch income statements which resulted in marketing services entities receiving income based on the profitability of retail loans originated by branch managers. Consequently, branch managers, as owners of the marketing services entities, received compensation based on the terms of transactions originated by the branch managers themselves.” In these cases, bureau examiners directed that compensation to loan originators based on a term of a ...

The CFPB issued a formal notice and request for information on how the credit card market is functioning and the effect credit card protections are having on both issuers and consumers. As per the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure (CARD) Act, the CFPB is required to conduct a review of the consumer credit market every two years. Among its focal points, the bureau wants to know how the terms and conditions of credit card agreements have changed since it conducted its review of the credit card market two years ago. “The bureau is looking to see how card issuers may have changed their pricing, marketing, underwriting, or other practices and whether those changes have benefited or harmed consumers,” the ...