Background and Privacy information

Background:
Beginning with Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data collected in 2017 and submitted in
2018, responsibility to receive and process HMDA data will transfer from the Federal Reserve
Board (FRB) to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). The HMDA agencies have
agreed that filing HMDA data collected in or after 2017 with the CFPB will be deemed
submission to the appropriate Federal agency1.
As the new processor, the CFPB is developing and implementing a web-based data submission
and edit-check system (the HMDA Platform) to process HMDA data. The two primary functions
the CFPB focused on in developing the HMDA platform are:
1) reducing burden in the submission process, and;
2) ensuring the historic high standards for data quality.
This means that the CFPB is eliminating the paper-based edit reports and time delays due to
multiple submissions with the current process. Therefore, the current software developed by
the FRB, the Data Entry Software (DES), will not be a supported tool beginning with the data
collected in 2017.
The CFPB realizes that some financial institutions, typically those with small volumes of
reported loans or those who do not use vendor or other software to prepare their HMDA data
for submission, will still need a software solution for integrating HMDA data from paper records
or disparate systems. Therefore, we have created a prototype “lar formatting tool” which will
allow financial institutions with small volumes of reported loans or those who do not use a
vendor or other software to prepare their HMDA data for submission, to enter HMDA data and
to create a pipe delimited text file to upload to the HMDA Platform. The financial institution can
then proceed through the interactive web pages of the HMDA Platform.
Please test the prototype using the attached instructions and provide us with feedback using
the attached follow up questions. This is a voluntary request and you may choose not to
participate. If you choose not to participate, the CFPB might not receive feedback necessary to
improving the HMDA submission process.