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DOJ Submits 2014 Equal Credit Opportunity Act Annual Report to Congress
On April 13, the DOJ released its 2014 Annual Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) Report highlighting its activities to address credit discrimination. The twenty-page report highlights discrimination lawsuits and settlements in the automobile lending and credit card industry, as well as a consent order resulting from alleged discrimination on the basis of disability and the receipt of public assistance. It also includes information on the DOJ’s work under other federal fair lending laws including the Fair Housing Act (FHA) and the Servicemember Civil Relief Act (SCRA). According to Vanita Gupta, Acting Assistant AG for the Civil Rights Division, in the five years since the Fair Lending Unit was established, the Civil Rights Division has filed or resolved 37 lending matters under the ECOA, FHA, and SCRA. Total settlements in these matters, including enforcement actions from 2014, have resulted in over $1.2 billion in monetary relief for affected borrowers and communities.
HUD Announces National Fair Housing Media Campaign; DOJ Acting Assistant AG Gupta Delivers Remarks
On April 1, HUD held a special Fair Housing event and announced a national media campaign to help ensure that all Americans – regardless of race, color, national origin, religion, gender, family status, and disability – receive equal access to housing, as per the FHA. Through various media channels, the new campaign will (i) increase the public’s awareness of housing discrimination; and (ii) explain how to report violations of the FHA. The new campaign is designed to further the agency’s enforcement efforts when FHA violations occur. At the same event, DOJ Acting Assistant AG Gupta delivered remarks regarding recent actions taken in response to alleged housing discrimination. Specifically, Gupta noted that while racial discrimination remains prevalent, familial status discrimination has recently become a significant concern and that the DOJ and HUD “continue to see the scourge of sexual harassment in housing.” Finally, Gupta emphasized that HUD’s proposed rule on Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing is “an important way to ensure that the promises of the Fair Housing Act will continue to be fulfilled.”
DOJ and North Carolina AG Settle First-Ever Federal Discrimination Suit Involving Auto Lending
On February 10, the DOJ, along with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of North Carolina and the North Carolina AG, announced the settlement of the federal government’s discrimination suit involving two “buy here, pay here” auto dealerships. According to the DOJ, this is the federal government’s first-ever settlement involving discrimination in auto lending. Filed in January 2014, the settlement resolves a lawsuit alleging that two North Carolina-based auto dealerships violated the federal Equal Credit Opportunity Act by “intentionally targeting African-American customers for unfair and predatory credit practices in the financing of used car purchases.” The North Carolina AG further alleges that the auto dealerships’ lending practices violated the state’s Unfair and Deceptive Trade Practices Act. The terms of the settlement require the two dealerships to revise the terms of their loans and repossession practices to ensure that “reverse redlining” ceases to exist; required amendments include: (i) setting the maximum projected monthly payments to 25% of the borrower’s income; (ii) omitting hidden fees from required down payment; (iii) prohibiting repossession until the borrower has missed at least two consecutive payments; and (iii) providing better-quality disclosure notices at the time of the sale. Also required by the settlement agreement, the two auto dealerships must establish a fund of $225,000 “to compensate victims of their past discriminatory and predatory lending."
Fair Housing Organization Files Suit for Alleged Racial Bias
On February 3, the Fair Housing Justice Center (FHJC), a regional fair housing non-profit organization based in New York City, filed a complaint alleging that a large bank discriminated in its mortgage lending practices on the basis of race and national origin. According to the complaint, the organization hired nine “testers” of various racial backgrounds to inquire about obtaining a mortgage for first-time homebuyers. Specifically, the complaint claims that the bank’s loan officers (i) used neighborhood racial demographics to steer minority testers to racially segregated neighborhoods and (ii) offered different loan terms and conditions based on race or national origin. The plaintiff is seeking compensatory and punitive damages and injunctive relief to ensure compliance with fair housing and fair lending laws. FHJC et al v. M&T Bank Corp., No-15-cv-779 (S.D. NY. Feb. 3, 2014).
CFPB Issues Guidance to Help Lenders Avoid Fair Lending Risk
On November 19, the CFPB issued a press release highlighting the publication of its compliance bulletin, “Social Security Disability Income Verification.” The compliance bulletin reminds lenders that requiring consumers receiving social security disability income to provide burdensome or unnecessary documentation may raise fair lending issues. The Equal Credit Opportunity Act (ECOA) prohibits lenders from discrimination against “an applicant because some or all of the applicant’s income is from a public assistance program, which includes Social Security disability income,” and the Bureau’s bulletin highlights standards and guidelines intended to help lenders comply with the requirements of ECOA and its implementing regulation, Regulation B.
NCUA To Join Fair Lending Webinar Hosted By The Federal Reserve Board
On October 15, the NCUA released a statement noting that Jamie Goodson, Director of Consumer Compliance Policy and Outreach in the National Credit Union Administration’s Office of Consumer Protection, will participate in the scheduled webinar, “Fair Lending Hot Topics.” Regulators from the Federal Reserve, the CFPB, the FDIC, the OCC, the Justice Department, and HUD are also scheduled to participate in the webinar on October 22. Webinar topics include, among others, auto lending enforcement, fair lending risk assessments, and mortgage pricing risks. The webinar is part of an ongoing series of consumer compliance events.
HUD Announces $35,000 Maternity Leave Fair Housing Agreement
On September 12, HUD announced a conciliation agreement with a Tennessee mortgage lender, pursuant to which the lender will pay $35,000 to resolve allegations that it violated the Fair Housing Act when it denied a mortgage loan to a couple because the lender did not consider the couple’s ability to make loan payments during the wife’s maternity leave despite the husband’s salary and the wife’s short-term disability insurance payments. Under the Fair Housing Act, it is unlawful to discriminate in the terms, conditions, or privileges associated with the sale of a dwelling on the basis of sex or familial status, including denying a mortgage loan or mortgage insurance because an applicant is pregnant or on maternity leave. In addition to requiring a payment be made to the couple, the company must adopt a national parental leave policy and receive annual fair housing and fair lending training. HUD has brought similar cases against other mortgage lenders in recent years.
CFPB Offers More Details On Plans To Supervise Auto Finance Market
On September 17, the CFPB released new information about its plans to supervise and enforce auto finance companies’ compliance with consumer financial laws, including fair lending laws. As it indicated it would earlier this year, the CFPB released a proposed rule that would allow it to supervise certain nonbank auto finance companies. Also as previously promised, the CFPB published a white paper on its method to proxy for race and national origin in auto finance transactions. Finally, the CFPB published its most recent Supervisory Highlights report, which is dedicated to its supervisory findings at depository institutions with auto finance operations.
The CFPB released the materials in connection with its September 18th field hearing on auto finance issues. These actions come roughly 18 months after the CFPB first provided guidance to auto finance companies regarding its expectations related to dealer “reserve” (or “participation”) and fair lending.
Larger Participant Rule
The Dodd-Frank Act grants the CFPB authority to supervise, regardless of size, nonbanks offering (i) certain mortgage-related products and services; (ii) private education loans; and (iii) payday loans. The CFPB also has the power to supervise “larger participants” in any other market for consumer financial products or services, provided that it first conducts a rulemaking to define “larger participants” within a particular market.
As proposed, the CFPB’s auto finance larger participant rule would allow the agency to supervise any nonbank finance company that has at least 10,000 aggregate annual originations. The rule would define “annual originations” as grants of credit for the purchase of an automobile, refinancings of such credit obligations and any subsequent refinancings thereof, and purchases or acquisitions of such credit obligations (including refinancings). It would also include “automobile leases” and purchases or acquisitions of automobile lease agreements. The rule would define “automobile” to include “any self-propelled vehicle primarily used for personal, family, or household purposes for on-road transportation” and to exclude “motor homes, recreational vehicles (RVs), golf carts, and motor scooters.”
The CFPB estimates the rule as proposed will allow it to oversee roughly 38 auto finance companies that the CFPB believes “originate around 90% of nonbank auto loans and leases.” As proposed the rule would not apply to title lending or the securitization of automobile loans and leases, but the CFPB requests comment on an approach that would include such activities. The rule also would not apply to auto dealers or to depository institutions.
Comments on the proposal are due 60 days after the proposed rule is published in the Federal Register.
Proxy Methodology White Paper
Since releasing its guidance on auto finance fair lending—which the CFPB has characterized as a restatement of existing law and which sought to establish publicly the CFPB’s grounds for asserting violations of ECOA against bank and nonbank auto finance companies for alleged “discretionary pricing policies”—the CFPB has faced pressure from industry stakeholders and lawmakers who have challenged the Bureau to provide additional information to support its approach to determining disparate impact.
The CFPB now provides additional information regarding one aspect of that approach—its method to proxy for race and national origin in the auto finance market, where such data is not collected as part of the financing process. The white paper reiterates that in conducting fair lending analysis of non-mortgage credit products in both supervisory and enforcement contexts, the CFPB’s Office of Research (OR) and Division of Supervision, Enforcement, and Fair Lending (SEFL) rely on a “Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG)” proxy method. That method combines geography- and surname-based information into a single probability for race and ethnicity. The paper is intended to explain the construction of the BISG proxy currently employed by OR and SEFL and purports to assess the performance of the BISG method using a sample of mortgage applicants for whom race and ethnicity are reported. The CFPB asserts that “research has found that this approach produces proxies that correlate highly with self-reported race and national origin and is more accurate than relying only on demographic information associated with a borrower’s last name or place of residence alone.”
In its paper, the CFPB states that “it does not set forth a requirement for the way proxies should be constructed or used by institutions supervised and regulated by the CFPB” and that the BISG proxy methodology “is not static; it will evolve over time as enhancements are identified that improve accuracy and performance.”
The paper does not address other aspects of the CFPB’s processes or methods used to determine disparate impact, such as (i) the controls applied to ensure sure that the consumers who are being compared are “similarly situated”; or (ii) the basis point thresholds at which the Bureau determines a prohibited pricing disparity exists.
Concurrent with the release of the white paper, the CFPB provided its statistical software code and an example of publicly available census data used to build the race and ethnicity proxy. Of note in its introduction, the CFPB states that it “may alter this methodology in particular analyses, depending on the circumstances involved.”
Supervisory Highlights and CFPB Expectations
Finally, the CFPB released its latest Supervisory Highlights report, which details alleged discrimination in the auto finance market the CFPB has uncovered at banks over the past two years.
The CFPB states that, generally, its examiners found that bank indirect auto creditors “had discretionary pricing policies that resulted in discrimination against African-American, Hispanic, and Asian and Pacific Islander borrowers. As a result, these borrowers paid more for their auto loans than similarly situated non-Hispanic white borrowers.”
Although it has only publicly announced one enforcement action to resolve such allegations, the CFPB’s report states that non-public CFPB supervisory actions at indirect auto financing institutions resulted in approximately $56 million in remediation for up to 190,000 consumers.
The report again urges auto finance companies to consider three possible ways the CFPB believes institutions can mitigate their fair lending risk by: (i) “monitor[ing] and, if necessary, correct[ing] disparities through a strong compliance management system”; (ii) limiting “the maximum discretionary pricing adjustment to an amount that significantly reduces or eliminates disparities”; or (iii) “compensat[ing] dealers using a non-discretionary mechanism.”
In its press release accompanying the above materials, the CFPB further outlined its expectations for auto finance companies, stating that “given the significance of car ownership in the lives of consumers,” the CFPB expects auto finance companies to:
- Fairly market and disclose auto financing. Specifically the CFPB “would be concerned if consumers are being misled about the benefits or terms of financial products,” and the Bureau is “also looking to ensure that consumers are getting terms they understand and accept.”
- Provide accurate information to credit bureaus. Citing its recent enforcement action against an auto finance company alleged to have inaccurately reported information like the consumer’s payment history and delinquency status to credit bureaus, the CFPB states that it is “looking to prevent inaccurate information from being reported in the future.”
- Treat consumers fairly when collecting debts. The CFPB states that it has received complaints from consumers who claim their vehicles have been repossessed while they are current on the loan or have a payment arrangement in place, and that the CFPB will ensure that collectors are relying on accurate information and using legal processes when they collect on debts or repossess vehicles.
SDNY Rejects Challenge To New York City's Responsible Banking Law
On September 9, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed an industry group’s challenge to a New York City ordinance that requires banks doing business with the city to report certain information about their banking and lending activities. New York Bankers Assoc. v. New York, No. 13-7212, 2014 WL 4435427 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 9, 2014). In May 2012, the New York City Council approved, over the Mayor’s veto, an ordinance that establishes a Community Investment Advisory Board (CIAB) with authority to collect certain information from the city’s depository banks regarding each bank’s efforts to, among other things, (i) meet small business credit needs; (ii) conduct consumer outreach and other steps to provide mortgage assistance and foreclosure prevention; and (iii) offer financial products for low and moderate-income individuals throughout the city. The ordinance also directs the CIAB to (i) perform an assessment on whether such banks are meeting the credit, financial, and banking services needs throughout the city; and (ii) publish the assessment and the information collected from each such bank. The results of these evaluations may be considered in connection with a bank’s application for designation or redesignation as a depository bank. The court dismissed for lack of standing the industry group’s argument that the ordinance conflicts with and is preempted by federal and state laws that exclusively regulate federal and state chartered depository institutions by granting the CIAB regulatory powers that are not relevant to the quality and pricing of the services that banks provide to the city. The court explained that at the time the suit was filed, the group could not establish imminent harm, or that injuries were subject to substantial risk of occurrence, and as such were too speculative to support Article III standing. The court noted, however, that the group “brings serious substantive claims” and may have standing based events that have occurred since filing, or that may occur in the future.
New York AG Sues Bank for Alleged Redlining
On September 2, the NY AG sued a regional bank claiming the bank engaged in unlawful discriminatory practices by intentionally avoiding offering mortgage loan products to predominately African-American neighborhoods in Buffalo. People of the State of New York v. Evans Bancorp, Inc. et al., No. 14-cv-00726 (W.D.N.Y. Sept. 2, 2014). In the complaint, the NY AG asserts that by creating a map of its lending area in Buffalo that included most of the city and its surroundings, but excluded certain African-American neighborhoods on the city’s east side, the bank engaged in redlining in violation of the Fair Housing Act, New York state human rights law, and city code. The suit also alleges that the bank did not market its loan products to minority customers and located bank branches and ATMs outside of minority neighborhoods. The NY AG further claims that the bank’s rates of lending and receiving applications from African-American borrowers allegedly lags behind comparable banks and that these purported discriminatory effects are due to the bank’s alleged redlining practices. The NY AG seeks injunctive relief, damages, civil penalties, punitive damages, fees and costs. In its release announcing the lawsuit, the NY AG stated that the suit is part of ongoing investigations by the AG into potential mortgage redlining across the state.