In a surprise ruling this week, a federal judge in Washington, DC, dismissed claims by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac shareholders challenging the Treasury Department’s 2012 “net-worth sweep” of nearly all the profits generated by the government-sponsored enterprises. Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled that Treasury and the Federal Housing Finance Agency are empowered by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008 to execute the “third amendment” of the preferred stock purchase agreement. The dismissal includes...

Mortgage servicers will likely proceed more carefully with their borrower interactions after the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau compelled Flagstar Bank to pay $37.5 million to settle allegations it interfered with borrowers’ attempts to save their homes. In the first enforcement action based on its new mortgage servicing rule, the CFPB ordered Flagstar to pay $27.5 million to the victims, and $10 million in to the bureau’s civil penalty fund. According to the consent order, Flagstar committed...

As Inside the CFPB was going to press, the bureau announced a $35 million enforcement action against Flagstar Bank for allegedly blocking borrowers’ attempts to save their homes, in violation of the CFPB’s mortgage servicing rules. This is the first enforcement action the bureau has initiated based on the new regulation. The regulator alleged that the bank closed borrower applications due to its own excessive delays. “Flagstar took excessive time to review loss mitigation applications, often causing application documents to expire,” said the agency. “To move its backlog, Flagstar would close applications due to expired documents, even though the documents had expired because of Flagstar’s delay.” The CFPB also accused the bank of delaying the approval or denial of borrower ...

Joint supervisory examinations by the CFPB and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency have led an enforcement action that will require U.S. Bank to pay $57 million to settle allegations it illegally charged for “add-on” products, harming more than 420,000 consumers. The government agencies accused U.S. Bank, headquartered in Minneapolis, of unfairly charging consumers for certain identity protection and credit monitoring services that they did not receive. These services were sold as “add-on products” for credit cards and other bank products, such as mortgage loans and checking accounts. Part of the problem could have been a breakdown in vendor management, which is an area of increasing importance to the CFPB. According to the findings contained in the consent ...

In a case that highlights the sensitivity of personal financial information and the firms that trade in it, the CFPB convinced a federal judge last week to freeze the assets of the Hydra Group, an online payday lender, and to put a receiver in place to stop an alleged illegal “cash-grab scam” at the business.According to the bureau, the Hydra Group used information purchased from online lead generators to access consumers’ checking accounts to illegally deposit payday loans – usually $200 to $300 – and withdraw fees ranging from $60 to $90 without consent. The organization then allegedly used falsified loan documents to claim that the consumers had agreed to the phony online payday loans. The CFPB’s lawsuit alleges that Richard ...

Corinthian Colleges accused the CFPB earlier this month of wrongly disparaging the career services assistance the for-profit company offers and of mischaracterizing both the purpose and practices of its “Genesis” lending program. The CFPB filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this month. In a statement provided to Inside the CFPB, Corinthian Colleges said the bureau’s complaint ignores “clear, easily obtainable evidence” that thousands of its graduates are hired into permanent positions by large and small employers across the U.S. every year. Instead, the complaint cites isolated incidents at Corinthian’s 97 U.S. campuses that violated company policy regarding job placement policies, the firm added. “The CFPB is aware of these cases because Corinthian identified the issues, took strong action to ...

State-licensed mortgage companies – and the agencies that oversee them – are on the verge of receiving the same kind of protections against waivers of privilege for information provided to the CFPB that was previously extended to depository mortgage lenders supervised by federal agencies. Before adjourning for the November elections, the U.S. Senate passed H.R. 5062, the Examination and Supervisory Privilege Parity Act of 2014. The bill would require the CFPB to coordinate its supervisory activities with state agencies that license, supervise or examine those non-depositories that offer consumer financial products or services. It also would provide that when someone shares information with those same state regulators, or with prudential regulators and state banking regulators, that sharing does not waive attorney-client privileges. ...

Members of the Senate and House Grand Old Party wasted no time in seizing upon a new report from the Government Accountability Office that confirmed the huge scope of the CFPB’s data collection initiative and cited weaknesses with data security and privacy. “The CFPB’s massive data collection effort is an unwarranted, unwelcome intrusion into the private financial lives of millions of Americans,” said Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee ranking member Mike Crapo, R-ID, who requested the study. “This GAO report confirms what the bureau would not – that it has been collecting information on up to 600 million American financial accounts, and it does not have the proper safeguards in place to protect the information it is collecting,” he ...

Did Apple Place Itself Within CFPB’s Purview? Some legal experts think the recent rollout of mobile payment technology by Apple Inc. might have put the consumer technology heavyweight in the CFPB’s regulatory crosshairs. Georgetown Law Professor Adam Levitin said in a recent blog that Apple may have unwittingly become a regulated financial institution through the release of its Apple Pay service. “Basically, I think Apple is now a ‘service provider’ for purposes of the Consumer Financial Protection Act, which means Apple is subject to CFPB examination and UDAAP [unfair, deceptive or abusive acts or practices],” he said. Levitin then proceeded to walk readers through a number of legal definitions to bolster his argument. Vivian Kim, an associate at the Dykema ...

Ginnie Mae has unveiled new plans for issuer standards as well as steps to boost liquidity in the mortgage servicing rights (MSR) market. Agency officials at a summit hosted by Ginnie Mae this week in Washington, DC, said both actions are designed to avoid issuer failures and to preserve residential mortgage servicing as an economically viable activity and MSRs as an attractive asset class. The officials said changes will be made to Ginnie’s mortgage-backed securities program to support the agency’s transformation from a pre-crisis bank-driven government MBS program to a post-crisis program where non-depositories and smaller financial institutions play a much bigger role. By the middle of next year, approximately a third of Ginnie MSRs will have changed hands over the previous four years, agency officials said. Many of the new owners of the servicing rights are ...