On April 30, the CFPB announced the appointment of Stuart Ishimaru as Director of the CFPB’s Office of Minority and Women Inclusion (OMWI). As we reported, the Dodd-Frank Act required the CFPB and various other federal agencies including the Fed, Treasury, OCC, FDIC, NCUA, SEC and FHFA, to establish an OMWI. Each of those agencies had already appointed their OMWI directors, leaving the CFPB the last agency to do so.
Before joining the CFPB, Mr. Ishimaru was a commissioner at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for nine years, and served as acting director from January 2009 to April 2010. Prior to that, he held a senior position in the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division and served as the acting staff director for the Commission on Civil Rights.
In his prepared remarks announcing Mr. Ishimaru’s appointment, Director Cordray highlighted the OMWI’s assigned task of developing standards for assessing diversity at the institutions the CFPB regulates.
To help consumer credit providers prepare for examinations and to prevent, manage, and defend against the increasing number of fair lending challenges, Ballard Spahr has created a Fair Lending Task Force. The task force brings together regulatory attorneys who deal with fair lending law compliance, litigators who defend against claims of fair lending violations, and labor attorneys who likewise understand the statistical analyses that underlie fair lending assessments and discrimination claims.