InfoBytes Blog
CFPB publishes HMDA review
On March 3, the CFPB published findings from a voluntary review of the 2015 HMDA Final Rule issued in October 2015, as well as subsequent related amendments that eased certain reporting requirements and permanently raised coverage thresholds for collecting and reporting data about closed-end mortgage loans and open-end lines of credit (covered by InfoBytes here). Under Section 1022(d) of Dodd-Frank, the Bureau is required to conduct an assessment of each significant rule or order adopted by the agency under federal consumer financial law. The Bureau noted that it previously determined that the 2015 HMDA Final Rule “is not a significant rule for purposes of section 1022(d)” and said the decision to conduct the review was voluntary.
The Report on the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act Rule Voluntary Review found, among other things, that (i) “[c]onsistent with the 2015 HMDA Final Rule’s increase in the closed-end reporting threshold for depository institutions, HMDA coverage of first lien, closed-end mortgages decreased between Q1 of 2017 and Q1 of 2018, from 97.0 percent to 93.8 percent”; (ii) for all financial institutions originating closed-end mortgages, “the share of those institutions reporting HMDA data decreased between 2015 and 2020, with the largest decreases observed in 2017 and 2020” after the reporting threshold rose from 25 loan originations to 100 loan originations; (iii) revising data points to include the age of applicant and co-applicant race, ethnicity, gender, and income, increased the amount of compiled data; and (iv) analyzing data assists in detecting fair lending risk and discrimination in mortgage lending. “HMDA’s expanded transactional coverage improved the risk screening used to identify institutions at higher risk of fair lending violation by improving the accuracy of analysis and thus reducing the false positive rate at which lenders were mistakenly identified as high risk,” the report said.
The report also noted that interest rate data “provides an important observation that enables data users, including government agencies, researchers, and consumer groups to analyze mortgage pricing in order to better serve HMDA’s purposes. In particular, interest rate information brings a greater transparency to the market and facilitates enforcement of fair lending laws.” The Bureau further noted that HMDA data is “crucial” to federal regulators when conducting supervisory examinations and enforcement investigations. The Bureau commented that the “requirement to report new HMDA data points greatly increased the accuracy of supervisory data since the additional data points are now used to assess fair lending risks and are subject to supervisory exams for accurate filing to HMDA,” adding that the data is “also used to estimate appropriate remuneration amounts for harmed consumers.”