Enforcement

Rohit Chopra, President Biden’s nominee to lead the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, has not minced words in calling out private companies for wrongdoing. He could get a grilling from Banking Committee Republicans and some opposition on the Senate floor.

The agency is recruiting more attorneys and shuffling personnel under new Democratic leadership as it prepares to toughen oversight of the financial services industry.

After the agency pulled back on fair-lending enforcement in the Trump administration, interim Director Dave Uejio has made clear his intent to use the “disparate impact” standard to launch more anti-discrimination probes.

Dave Uejio, acting director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, promised to protect veterans from predatory loans and to crack down on companies that improperly garnish stimulus checks or mistreat struggling borrowers.

The former executive at Lend America, who has remained out of prison since his 2011 guilty plea, will not be incarcerated for his acts.

Michael Gramins, who a jury convicted in 2017, was among more than a half-dozen traders charged by federal prosecutors in Connecticut with misrepresenting the prices of mortgage-backed securities to clients in order to increase their firm’s profits and their bonuses.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has taken a hands-off approach to servicers during the pandemic. But with forbearance plans set to expire and President-elect Biden likely to appoint new CFPB leadership, companies lacking aggressive plans to help borrowers could face tougher enforcement.

The three companies agreed to pay a total of $74 million in remediation.

A Boulder, Colo., man was sentenced to five years in prison after using information obtained through legitimate transactions to create and sell almost $32 million of fraudulent loan packages to a bank.

The agency’s final rule modernizing the Fair Debt Collection Practice Act limits calls to seven per week, but collectors won stronger protections from liability claims and other key changes to the original proposal.