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By Matthew R. Lee, Video, FOIA fee denial

SOUTH BRONX, SDNY, Nov 9 – The US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, days after complaints about withholding 2018 mortgage data by race and a FOIA request from Inner City Press responded by taking the 2017 data offline. Photo here. This bureaucratic retaliation and/or criminal negligence should be the subject of Congressional hearings and then firings.

  Eric Blankenstein while working at the increasingly rogue Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was kept on despite openly racist blog posts. (The CFPB is now withholding from impacted comments the 2018 mortgage lending data by race, see below). Now Blackenstein has been promoted by HUD to VP at GinnieMae. This is a pattern.

With Comptroller of the Currency Joseph Otting moving to undermine the US Community Reinvestment Act, his latest move has been to refuse to consider a timely CRA protest to People's United Bank by Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch.

Now with the OCC yet to be sued for its contempt for the law, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau under Kathy Kraninger has launched a no action letter process for fintech, giving assurances without any public notice or comment that activities can be undertaken with no concern about enforcement. See here.

In September Kraninger's CFPB issued 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data - with an interface without any racial or ethnic information unlike 2017 and every previous year, undermining the entire purpose of the HMDA law. See this page.

  Now after various attempts to get CFPB to acknowledge its outrageous move in disenfranchising grassroots groups from the data meant to benefit them, which we will leave UNdescribed for now, Inner City Press on November 7 submitted a FOIA request see below. The CFPB has acknowledged receipt, but says it has a unspecified backlog and has denied the request for expedited processing because it does not think redlined communities defending their rights and lives with the CRA is urgent.

"Dear Mr. Lee: This letter is to inform you that on November 8, 2019, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) received your Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request dated November 7, 2019.  Your request sought: [a]ll records regarding the CFPB's decision / action to make the 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data only available for download (the so-called data filter) rather then searchable and viewable in reports on the CFPB website as was the case for the 2017 data. Please be advised that the CFPB FOIA Office has a backlog of pending FOIA requests.  We are diligently working to process each request in the order in which it was received.  Your patience is greatly appreciated.  The CFPB FOIA regulations found at 12 C.F.R. Part 1070 specifically define “representative of the news media” as “any person or entity that gathers information of potential interest to a segment of the public, uses its editorial skills to turn the raw materials into a distinct work, and distributes that work to an audience.”  Based on the information contained in your request, the CFPB has granted your request to be considered a “representative of the news media"... Your request for expedited processing is Denied because you failed to demonstrate a particular urgency to inform the public about the government activity involved in the request beyond the public’s right to know about government activity generally." Really?

The request: "Dear CFPB Chief FOIA Officer:  Pursuant to the federal Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, I request from the CFPB any and all records as that term is defined in FOIA regarding the CFPB's decision / action to make the 2018 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data only available for download (the so-called data filter) rather then searchable and viewable in reports on the CFPB website as was the case for the 2017 data.

     To assist you in rapidly providing the requested information - this is a request for expedited treatment given that the withholding in accessible format of the 2018 data each day hinders low income community groups from commenting on bank mergers, the only enforcement mechanism of the Community Reinvestment Act to prevent bank redlining - be aware that the issue has been raised to CFPB staff in a number of conference calls including most recently to, inter alia  Brenda Muniz, Tim Lambert [some names redacted in this format.]

  These CFPB staffers were directly asked by the undersigned who at CFPB made the decision to curtail availability of HMDA data in simple format on the website. Knowing which government agency official made such a decision is a sine qua non of FOIA: the information should be provided an expedite basis, as well as all related documents." Watch this site.

On October 12 Inner City Press reported a flood of identical comments *supporting* Kraninger and the CFPB like this one on HMDA: "Comment Submitted by Anonymous Sonnenburg, I appreciate the CFPB's recent willingness to reconsider and revise its prior rulemakings." This while CFPB is still withhold the basis race and ethic information from display on its website, raw data download only unlike previous years. This is an outrage - and its having impacts. The Federal Reserve, citing the CFPB, rubber stamped Hancock Whitney - MidSouth Bank, and is prepared to close its comment periods on Simmons - Landrum and other proposed mergers while the CFPB on September 7 is still saying this: "We will retire HMDA Explorer and its API Our tool for exploring HMDA data—and the Public Data Platform API that powers it—will be shut down in the coming months. We will post additional details as they become available.  The 2018 HMDA data include a number of new data points and, as a result, are not compatible with the multi-year functionality provided by the Public Data Platform.    The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) will publish a query tool for the 2018 data in the coming months, which will be available at ffiec.cfpb.gov.  After the new query tool becomes available, the Bureau will retire the current HMDA Explorer tool and the Public Data Platform API  that powers it."  In the coming months? The CFPB has months to do this. They are intentionally making it more difficult for the public to access basic fair lending information.

 This is confirmed in a blithe "request for comments" that includes "the HMDA Platform allows users to produce and export custom data sets rather than relying on numerous static reports that few previously accessed. To enable external software developers to access some of the key services offered by the HMDA Platform, the Bureau publishes Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that can be integrated into external websites, analytical tools, and industry software. The Bureau has innovated in other areas as well."

 Inner City Press has commented:   Dear Director Kraninger and others at CFPB:     On behalf of Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch, which has reviewed and publicized HMDA data for years, this is a comment both on Docket No. CFPB–2019– 0048 and specifically demanding that CFPB's troubling whitewash of the 2018 HMDA data, refusing to make it simply available with race and ethnicity information, be reversed and the data made available as below.    Your proposal (mis) states that "tthe HMDA Platform allows users to produce and export custom data sets rather than relying on numerous static reports that few previously accessed.      That is false, and is also an unacceptable pretext to make race and ethnicity HMDA data less available.  As Inner City Press has previously written to CFPB staff, so far without action: Go to  https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/data-publication/disclosure-reports   Compare disclosure for 2017 (with race and ethnicity)  https://ffiec.cfpb.gov/data-publication/disclosure-reports/2017      to 2018 - no race or ethnicity.     CFPB must make this basic information available, in simple format that can be used by grassroots groups. Already time is going by in which the 2018 data is ostensibly available but grassroots groups cannot access race and ethnicity information as they did before, which is among the goals of HMDA data.     Please explain when and where this information will be made available again.   Matthew Lee, Esq., Executive Director Inner City Press / Fair Finance Watch." Watch this site.

 Previously CFPB issued a rule relieving payday lenders of the duty to comply with the ability-to-repay standard for the CFPB’s short term lending rule of November 2017.

  CFPB is eliminating the public's front door to the HMDA data, the HMDA Explorer web site that many community groups such as the hundreds that are members of NCRC use to assess banks in their communities. The CFPB wants to take even this away. They should be sued. There will be fight-back, under NCRC's TreasureCRA campaign. Watch this site - including on actual enforcement of CRA.

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