As the new year is quickly approaching, we have continued to receive a number of questions regarding a potential final HMDA rule that would (possibly) increase the thresholds for reporting of both closed-end and open-end loans. This, of course, could provide significant relief to HMDA reporters, especially those reporters who have fairly small HMDA LARs.
As the CFPM released their Fall regulatory agenda this week (11/20/19), the Bureau provided us with a bit of insight into their plans for two potential new HMDA rules that could provide significant relief to HMDA reporters.
First, the CFPB stated that they intend to release a rule “in the spring of 2020 [that] would address the proposed changes to the permanent thresholds for collecting and reporting data on open-end lines of credit and closed-end mortgage loans.” As you will recall, the proposed rule provided two possible options for increasing the reporting threshold for closed-end loans. Option 1 would adjust the coverage threshold from 25 to 50 closed-end mortgage loans (relieving 745 additional HMDA reporters), while option 2 would increase the coverage threshold to 100 closed-end mortgage loans (relieving 1,682 more institutions from HMDA reporting). As the CFPB is stating that this highly anticipated rule won’t be released until the spring of 2020, it appears that small HMDA reporters will need to plan to collect HMDA data in 2020, at least until a final rule is released.
Secondly, the Bureau stated that they expect to issue a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) in the summer of 2020 to follow up on the Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) that was issued in May of 2019 that would consider unwarranted regulatory burden concerning some of the new HMDA data points as well as coverage of certain business or commercial purpose loans.
The full regulatory agenda can be found here. https://www.consumerfinance.gov/policy-compliance/rulemaking/regulatory-agenda/