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Financial Services Law Insights and Observations

CFPB Updates Status of Standard for Assessing Diversity at Supervised Institutions

CFPB Diversity

Consumer Finance

On March 29, the CFPB’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OWMI) published its annual report about the CFPB’s diversity and inclusion efforts from January 1, 2012 until December 31, 2012. The Dodd-Frank Act created the CFPB OWMI and similar offices at other federal financial regulatory agencies and tasked each office with advising its agency head on the impact of the policies and regulations of the agency on minority-owned and women-owned businesses, and developing standards for (i) equal employment opportunity and the racial, ethnic, and gender diversity of the agency workforce and senior management; (ii) increased participation of minority-owned and women-owned businesses in the programs and contracts of the agency; and (iii) assessing the diversity policies and practices of entities regulated by the agency. With regard to regulated entities, the report notes that in February 2013 the CFPB entered into a Memorandum of Understanding with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to access employment demographic survey data, which will provide a starting point to analyze the composition of regulated entities. The CFPB also reports that the various OWMIs are developing a common standard for assessing the diversity policies and practices of regulated entities and plan to publish draft standards for comment sometime in 2013.