Acting bureau director ends pause on HMDA reporting
(Feb. 5, 2021) CFPB will end the agency’s “pause” on quarterly Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) reporting for large issuers, CARD Act data collection and more, according to a public blog post by the agency’s acting director.
Dave Uejio, named the bureau acting director by President Joe Biden Jan. 20, also noted his desire to retain maximum flexibility for Biden’s nominee as bureau director – Rohit Chopra — and his plan to review past regulatory actions to determine how those actions best fit with the bureau’s consumer protection mission and purpose.
Last March, in response to the economic and financial impact of the coronavirus crisis, the bureau announced that as of March 26, 2020 “and until further notice, the CFPB does not intend to cite in an examination or initiate an enforcement action against any institution for failure to report its HMDA data quarterly.” Uejio’s blog post is, essentially, the “further notice” that the pause has ended.
Also in the blog post, Uejio said he has directed the agency’s division of Research, Markets, and Regulations (RMR) to take immediate steps to analyze housing insecurity (including mortgage foreclosures) and consumer finance barriers to racial equity, and to include a racial equity impact in policy proposals.
He also directed RMR to focus rulemaking on the pandemic response. To that end, he told the division to focus the mortgage servicing rulemaking on pandemic response to avert, to the extent possible, a foreclosure crisis when the COVID-19 forbearances end in March and April; and explore options for preserving the status quo with respect to qualified mortgage (QM) and debt collection rules.