The U.S. Chamber of Commerce issued a letter to Richard Cordray, Director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, calling for a significant improvement in supervision and authority processes.
The letter urges the CFPB to consider changes toward helping businesses and households.
“The effect of this continued uncertainty and inefficiency is not simply to impose excessive, unjustified costs on legitimate businesses seeking to comply with the law—it directly constrains the lending, especially lending to small businesses that our economy desperately needs in order to grow and create jobs for the millions of Americans who remain unemployed,” said President and Chief Executive Officer David Hirschmann of Commerce.
The letter stands in contrast to the position of the Mortgage Bankers Association CEO David Stevens, who believes the CFPB is doing a good job in regards to its approach to housing finance regulation.
Among the suggestions of improvement, the Chamber calls for training of supervision staff, consistent examination approaches, ceasing the involvement of enforcement personnel in the exam process and closing examinations succinctly and uniformly.
More importantly, the Chamber noted that the CFPB has adopted a practice of “issuing extremely expansive requests for information.”
The example used was the demand issued to PHH Corporation (PHH) that requested documents produced for more than a decade relating to an aspect of the company’s mortgage insurance business.
“Your rejection of PHH’s challenge to the breadth of this request is troubling, because it effectively gives carte blanche to Bureau investigators to impose huge financial burdens on companies at the outset of an investigation,” Hirschmann said.
The Chamber noted that they are not aware of any other agency that routinely issues “such broad demands.”
As a result, the CFPB is being asked to reconsider its policy in this area and adopt new approaches that are consistent with the Federal Trade Commission as well as other regulatory agencies.
On July 2, the Chamber issued its first letter, suggesting steps to improve the CFPB’s supervision and regulatory processes.
