Federal banking agencies, including the National Credit Union Administration and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, should develop specific directions on how credit unions and banks may use alternative data in the credit underwriting process, the Government Accountability Office said in a new report.
Appearing to confirm the suspicions of Democratic critics, the Government Accountability Office reported Monday that the Trump Administration haphazardly reorganized the consumer bureau’s fair lending office, resulting in confusion at the agency and a drop in enforcement actions.
In a scathing report, the Government Accountability Office said the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, under then Acting Director Mick Mulvaney and then former Director Kathleen Kraninger, failed to produce any documentation to justify transferring the agency’s Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity to another branch in the director’s office.
The House next week will consider legislation that would prohibit the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau from implementing large parts of its third-party debt collection rule—a regulation that the Trump Administration wrote and the Biden Administration already has delayed.
Consumers from predominantly minority counties submitted more complaints on a per capita basis than consumers in other counties, according to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Citing the pandemic, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is proposing to delay by 60 days the effective dates of debt collection rules that were issued by the Trump Administration last year. The agency is seeking public comment on the proposal, but the proposal first must be published in the Federal Register.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is proposing a rule that would stop mortgage servicers from foreclosing on most home loans before December 31, 2021. This follows the agency’s withdrawal of its earlier position that financial services companies would have flexibility in following agency rules during the pandemic. The comment period on the proposed mortgage rule will be open until May 10.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau expects mortgage servicers to follow the regulations that help homeowners keep their homes as pandemic protections end. The CFPB released the criteria on which they plan to evaluate mortgage servicers.
The Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is back to a regulatory regime, rescinding a series of pandemic-related policy rollbacks. The pandemic will no longer be an acceptable excuse for failing to follow the CFPB’s consumer protection rules. Agency officials were quite clear about what will be expected of financial institutions going forward.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau may reinstitute the agency’s rule that would require payday loan borrowers to demonstrate their ability to repay a loan before it is approved.
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Consumer Response staff has been reorganized and cut during the past three years—moves that could affect the agency’s handling of consumer complaints that have skyrocketed during the pandemic, the CFPB’s Inspector General said in a report issued last week. The Consumer Response office was moved structurally twice and ended up in the newly created Division of Consumer Education and External Affairs, the IG said, in a report on the management challenges the CFPB faces. “These moves may affect the management of consumer complaints, particularly as the Bureau has redistributed some of Consumer Response’s resources to