As previously reported, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development issued Mortgagee Letter 2019-06 in April of 2019 to impose new documentation requirements for down payment assistance provided by government entities to be used in connection with Federal Housing Administration (FHA) insured loans. CBC Mortgage Agency, which is an instrumentality of the Cedar Band of Paiutes Indian American tribe, operates the Chenoa Fund down payment assistance program. The Agency challenged HUD’s action in the…

In this podcast, we discuss the CFPB’s proposed requirement for a collector to communicate with a debtor before furnishing information about the debt to a consumer reporting agency and proposed prohibition on selling or transferring a debt that is the subject of an identity theft report.  We also look at the challenges collectors would face in complying with both the proposed FDCPA dispute rules and the current FCRA dispute process and the proposal’s implications for…

Three more bills dealing with credit reporting were passed on Tuesday by the House Financial Services Committee.  Like the four bills passed by the Committee last week, none of the bills passed yesterday received any Republican votes. The bills, which are listed below, would make various amendments to the FCRA, including those described below: The “Student Borrower Credit Improvement Act.”  The bill would prohibit a consumer reporting agency (CRA) from providing a consumer…

As readers of our blog know, our consumer financial services group has been at the forefront of legal developments involving new technologies.  To align with the work that we’ve been doing in the financial technology space and to even better serve our clients in meeting the legal challenges in this rapidly developing landscape, Ballard Spahr has created a cross-disciplinary Fintech team that brings together the firm’s consumer financial services attorneys with lawyers focused on privacy…

Four bills dealing with credit reporting were passed last Thursday by the House Financial Services Committee.  While there has been bipartisan support for credit reporting reform, none of the bills received any Republican votes. The bills, which are listed below, would make various amendments to the FCRA, including those described below: The “Improving Credit Reporting for All Consumers Act” would impose new requirements for conducting reinvestigations of consumer disputes and related standards, require consumer…

There was movement last week on two California bills that we have been tracking closely and which could substantially alter the lending and brokering landscape under the California Financing Law (“CFL”). On July 9th, AB-539, which proposes to cap interest rates at 36% plus the federal funds rate on CFL loans of $2,500 to $10,000, passed the Senate Committee on Judiciary and was sent to the Appropriations Committee where we believe the bill will…

The Office of Inspector General for the CFPB (and the Fed) recently issued a report on its evaluation of the Office of Consumer Response’s sharing of complaint data within the CFPB. As background, the report describes the tools available to Bureau users of complaint data (complaint-sharing tools) to search such data, identify issues, and summarize data, and also describes Consumer Response’s process for approving access to these tools. Based on its analysis of 2017 data,…