Lenders that originated fewer than 1,000 loans in the past two years can bypass some of the data collection and reporting required by the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau said in a statement issued Thursday.
Specifically, partial exemptions now apply to insured depository institutions and credit unions that originated fewer than 500 closed-end mortgage loans or 500 open-end lines of credit in each of the two preceding calendar years.
The CFPB’s statement was an amendment to the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act, which President Donald Trump signed in May to roll back some of the oversight mandated by Dodd-Frank.
Part of Trump’s act provides partial exemptions to HMDA, a law enacted in the 1970s that requires lenders to publicly report mortgage data. Designed to prevent discrimination, HMDA has long been a thorn in the side of the lending community.
But with the Trump administration’s working to scale back regulatory authority, HMDA might have less of a bite.
Under the recent amendment, the CFPB has exempted the institutions that meet the requirements above from “the collection, recording, and reporting requirements for some, but not all, of the data points specified in current Regulation C” of HMDA.
The bureau said this will not affect the format of the Loan/Application Registers for institutions filing HMDA data collected in 2018. It also said it expects to provide further guidance on the applicability of the Act to HMDA data collected in 2018 later this summer.
