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The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency is gearing up to propose the first overhaul of a landmark anti-redlining law in decades, a plan expected to broaden the definition of the communities a bank serves in the digital age and to create new ways to measure lenders' compliance, Politico reported. The OCC plans to release its proposed rule on the Community Reinvestment Act on Dec. 13, though it could come a day earlier if the FDIC signs on at a board meeting, according to people familiar with the matter. FDIC Chairman Jelena McWilliams said last week that she would likely agree to the proposal this week. Both banks and community groups have long called for modernizing the CRA, a 1977 law that was written decades before the advent of digital banking. The law, aimed at combating redlining, or racial bias in lending, requires banks to meet the needs of local communities where their branches are based, including low- and moderate-income borrowers. Comptroller Joseph Otting said that it is his aim to “encourage banks to do billions more in lending and investment in communities that desperately need more capital and economic opportunity.” But some consumer groups worry that the end result will instead be to dilute the process so that banks can receive credit without doing much to help the law’s intended beneficiaries.

Some of the biggest names in finance are warning that the government’s plan to return Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to private ownership risks disrupting a market critical to the U.S. housing system, the Wall Street Journal reported. The investors, including BlackRock Inc., Fidelity Investments and Pacific Investment Management Co., have told the Trump administration that any move to privatize Fannie and Freddie should include an explicit guarantee of the $5 trillion in mortgage-backed securities they issue, which only Congress can provide. The Trump administration, by contrast, says that it is willing to move forward without such a guarantee, arguing that it is past time for the government to reduce its role in housing. To prevent a collapse of the mortgage-finance giants during the 2008 financial crisis, the U.S. government agreed to absorb unlimited losses at the companies and ultimately provided nearly $190 billion in taxpayer money. Eleven years later, the Trump administration has outlined plans to put the companies back into private hands—and the way in which taxpayers could be on the hook to bail out the institutions has emerged as a stumbling block.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau won a $59 million judgment against a pair of shuttered mortgage relief law firms that the bureau alleged scammed consumers seeking to escape underwater home loans, Bloomberg Law reported. The bankruptcy estates of the Mortgage Law Group and the Consumer First Legal Group, along with the firms’ principle members, will pay a combined $59 million in restitution and civil money penalties, according to a Nov. 4 post-trial order by Judge William Conley of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The two firms had argued that some district court orders and the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2017 decision in Kokesh v. SEC limited the CFPB’s ability to collect restitution from companies and individuals that violate federal consumer financial protection laws. Conley found that those rulings did not stop the CFPB from ordering disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, with Kokesh only applying to the statute of limitations for such penalties. The CFPB sued Mortgage Law Group and the Consumer First Legal Group in July 2014, alleging that they had collected more around $22 million in improper advance fees from clients, misrepresenting the types of relief services they provided consumers and other violations. The two law firms and their principles were found liable for most of those claims in a July 2016 summary judgment order. The Mortgage Law Group filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2014, while Consumer First Legal Group stopped operations in 2013.