Community lending representatives met with Trump administration officials last week to push a package of pro-growth, regulatory relief proposals, including a number of changes to the mortgage rules promulgated by the CFPB. The meeting was held with Treasury Department officials under President Donald Trump’s executive order directing the Treasury to review existing laws, treaties, regulations, guidance, reporting and recordkeeping to determine if they promote or inhibit federal regulation of the U.S. financial system as per Trump’s core principles outlined in Executive Order 13772. Meeting with the Trump administration officials were a handful of CEOs of bank that are members of the Independent Community Bankers of America.Among the proposed changes the trade group advocated was a more expansive qualified mortgage ...

New York State Aligns State Law With TRID. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, D, recently signed into law Senate Bill S982, legislation that tweaks the existing state legal definition of the “consummation” of a mortgage loan to synchronize with the Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act Integrated Disclosure Rule promulgated by the CFPB.... Industry Need to Get TRID-Compliant Boosts DocMagic’s Bottom Line. Industry vendor DocMagic, based in Torrance, CA, late last week reported a 42 percent increase in revenue for 2016, due in large part to industry demand for products that enable compliance with the CFPB’s Truth in Lending Act/Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act Integrated Disclosure Rule, otherwise known as TRID....

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau late last week filed its much-anticipated response to the decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit to grant the agency’s request for an en banc rehearing in its legal wrangling with PHH Mortgage over allegations of violating the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. The CFPB made three main arguments. First, the bureau’s structure is constitutional. “Neither the bureau’s single-director structure, nor the for-cause removal provision, unduly interferes with the president’s ability to take care that the laws be faithfully executed” under the U.S. Constitution, it said. If the court were to decide that the agency’s structure is unconstitutional, the bureau added...

As different as the presidential administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump may appear, one thing they have in common is an apparent unwillingness to get into the statutory weeds when it comes to the interpretation and enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. Earlier this month, the Department of Justice under the Trump administration, just as it had under the Obama administration, side-stepped the RESPA issues associated with the long-running battle between PHH Mortgage and the CFPB.In its amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the government said simply: “The United States takes no position on the statutory issues in this case….” For the Trump administration, the case comes down ...

With the industry still waiting for resolution of PHH Corp. v. CFPB and the interpretation and enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act at stake, political partisans on Capitol Hill last week addressed the constitutionality of the CFPB, or the supposed lack thereof, with Republicans on the offense and Democrats on defense. During a hearing last week before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, Rep. Trey Hollingsworth, R-IN, asked former U.S. Solicitor General Theodore Olson, now a partner with the Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher law firm, what steps would need to be taken to make the CFPB truly constitutional in its governmental function. Olson, who is representing PHH Corp. in its struggle with the bureau but ...

The Trump administration late last week filed its amicus brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in PHH Corp. v. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and, as expected, sided with the lender this time around, but didn’t go as far as some had hoped it would. In its brief, the Department of Justice argued in support of eliminating the removal-only-for-cause protection that currently applies to the director of the CFPB. However, whereas PHH has argued that the CFPB be eliminated in its entirety, the Trump administration argued in favor of retaining the CFPB, but with a director removable at the will of the president. Currently, the director may be removed...

With the enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act at stake, and a hostile occupant in the Oval Office, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is certainly not being bashful about continuing its regulation-by-enforcement modus operandi. The recent enforcement action against Prospect Mortgage is just the latest example. According to Colgate Selden, a partner in the Washington, DC, office of the law firm of Alston & Bird, the case is important because “it indicates the CFPB is moving full-speed ahead regardless” of the recent court rulings in PHH v. CFPB. This case is...

Nearly all of the discussion related to the ongoing legal battle between PHH Corp. and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has involved either questions about the bureau’s interpretation and enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act or issues having to do with the constitutionality of the CFPB. But the role played by the administrative law judge early in the bureau’s enforcement action has surfaced, with potential significance in the eyes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which recently granted the agency’s request for a rehearing by the full court. To adjudicate the matter early on, the CFPB borrowed...

The Trump administration has subtly signaled its support for PHH Corp. in the mortgage lender’s long-running dispute with the CFPB over alleged violations of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act. In recent days, the Department of Justice asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit for permission to file an amicus brief in the case by March 17, one week after the deadline the court had given PHH to file its response to the court’s decision to grant the CFPB’s request for an en banc rehearing.The court has since granted the administration’s request for the one-week extension. In its request, the Justice Department said, “As this court recognized in calling for the views of the ...

The attorneys general of 15 states came to the defense of PHH Corp. and related parties in their case with the CFPB over the agency’s interpretation and enforcement of the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act.The AGs of Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wisconsin focused on the constitutional issues in the case, with not a single mention of the statutory questions related to the act. The AGs made three major arguments in support of PHH’s position. First, they asserted that the separation of powers plays a critical role in preserving the division of authority within the federal system, and the CFPB’s governance structure violates the separation of powers ...