adminCUNA hosted a webinar on October 10th with Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection staff on changes to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) reporting requirements. A recording of the webinar is available for free to CUNA members, and will be available shortly.
Partial exemptions from HMDA reporting are part of the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act (S. 2155), and the bureau issued an interpretive final rule in August clarifying the exemptions.
Among other things, the rule clarifies that only loans and lines of credit that are otherwise HMDA reportable count toward the threshold for the partial exemptions and clarifies which of the data points in Regulation C are covered by partial exemption.
Generally, an insured financial institution does not need to collect or report certain data with respect to:
– Closed-closed end mortgage loans if the institution originated fewer than 500 such loans in each of the two preceding calendar years; and
– Open-end lines of credit if it originated fewer than 500 such lines of credit un each of the two preceding calendar years.
According to bureau staff, its operational approach remains unchanged. Each year, it will provide an updated Filing Instruction Guide (FIG) to assist with the filing process, users will then compile one Loan Application Register (LAR) and submit the file through the HMDA platform.
But the bureau will offer flexibility for 2018 submissions, allowing users to take partial exemptions for any of the eligible data points if they are below the threshold requirements. These partial exemptions can be taken any point in the year, and are retroactive to dates on or after Jan. 1, 2018.
Users can exercise these partial exemptions on one, some or all LAR records, and the same goes for data points.
The webinar also features detailed examples how to utilize the partial exemptions and lists of exemption codes.
The bureau has several tools available to aid compliance, including:
-The 2018 FIG, which incorporates the August 2018 HMDA rule;
-The official bureau implementation guide on the rule; and
–Tools to assist financial institutions in getting HMDA Lars ready for filing, including file format verification, formatting tools and rate spread calculators.
Read the full Washington Wire here.
