Compliance & Regulation

Starting in April, mortgage lenders will be able to use a new product that will prevent short sale fraud and accelerate transaction times.

Starting this year and following, you must issue 1099’s to anyone you pay over $600 cumulatively during the year. Previously this did not apply to corporations. Now it does. If you pay your office supply company, your business landlord rent, any and all vendors paid over $600, then at year-end you must send them and file the appropriate 1099.

Not only are state attorneys general pushing the nation's megabanks to sign a servicing settlement tied to faulty foreclosure practices, but they want these institutions to sign a regulatory consent order, holding their boards' responsible for correcting deficiencies.

Although bankers are likely to have significant concerns about the risk retention proposal due next week, they appear to have won at least one victory already: a choice over how to structure risk that must be retained.

Up until a few years ago, quality control was not necessarily top-of-mind for many financial institutions. Mortgage executives knew it was there and that it was necessary to meet the requirements of the GSEs and other investors.

When the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was first being discussed in Washington there was little emphasis — if any—on its role in regulating residential servicing. But in the wake of the nation's “robo-signing” scandal all that has changed.

Fitch Ratings will not return the title insurance industry's outlook to stable until it sees evidence of a return to sustainable profitability and surplus growth.

Mortgage bankers likely won't see any official proposals to revamp servicing compensation until late summer, Government National Mortgage Association president Ted Tozer said Friday morning.

The Community Mortgage Banking Project on Friday submitted an amicus brief in support of mortgage brokers who are trying to convince a U.S. district court in Washington to block the Federal Reserve's loan officer compensation rule which goes into effect late next week.

Four state attorneys general have sent a letter to Iowa AG Tom Miller objecting to provisions of the 27-page proposed settlement with the top five servicers.