The Trump administration is planning to suspend routine examinations of lenders for violations of the Military Lending Act, which was devised to protect military service members and their families from financial fraud, predatory loans and credit card gouging, according to internal agency documents, the New York Times reported. Mick Mulvaney, the interim director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, intends to scrap the use of so-called supervisory examinations of lenders, arguing that such proactive oversight is not explicitly laid out in the legislation, the main consumer measure protecting active-duty service members, according to a two-page draft of the change. The proposal surprised advocates for military families, who have urged the government to use its powers to crack down harder on unscrupulous lenders. The consumer bureau conducted dozens of investigations into payday and other lenders during the Obama administration without any significant legal opposition, and no lenders are currently challenging its oversight based on the law, according to administration officials. The bureau will still bring individual cases against lenders who are found to charge in excess of the annual interest rate cap of 36 percent mandated under the law, and continue to supervise lenders under other statutes. But it will scrap supervisory examinations, which are the most powerful tool for proactively uncovering abuses and patterns of illegal practices by companies suspected of wrongdoing, former consumer bureau enforcement officials said. Read more.
ABI President Ted Gavin of Gavin/Solmonese LLC (Wilmington, Del.) and John Ames of Bingham Greenebaum Doll LLP (Louisville, Ky.), a former ABI President), talked with ABI Executive Director Sam Gerdano about ABI's new Veterans' Affairs Task Force on a podcast. Providing more details on the formation of the Task Force, which also includes former ABI President John Penn of Perkins Coie (Dallas) and former ABI Resident Scholar Jack Williams and Susan Seabury of Baker Tilly (Atlanta), Gavin and Ames discuss what the Task Force aims to accomplish — and ways that ABI members can help. Listen here.
