Puerto Rico Bankers Association Calls Section 1071 Absurd and Unreasonable

Section 1071, the law that grants the CFPB authority to collect loan application data on minority and women-owned businesses, is under fire, again. This time it’s the Puerto Rico Bankers Association in response to the CFPB’s RFI on the matter. In a letter, the PRBA points out the sheer irony of conducting costly disparate impact studies on minorities in minority-only communities.

An excerpt from their statement:

According to the 2010 US Census Bureau, 99% of the population of Puerto Rico is Hispanic.

[…]

The direct and evident effect of Section 704B of ECOA for the financial institutions in Puerto Rico will inevitably be the collection, recordkeeping and reporting of virtually all commercial loan applications received within the Puerto Rico marketplace, since most of such applicants would be regarded as “Minority Owned Business”, in accordance with Section 704B.

The PRBA believes that this absurd and unreasonable result must not have been intended by Congress when it enacted Section 1071 of the Dodd-Frank Act. The data so collected, maintained and reported will not serve the purposes for with Section 1071 was enacted since, for the reasons set forth above, it will be completely inaccurate and unreliable. The potential complexity and cost of compliance with the minority-owned businesses data collection and reporting requirements of Section 704(B), will impose on our banks an unintended and unreasonable burden.

Other responses to the CFPB’s RFI have so far called Section 1071, “literally impossible to comply with” and a duplicated effort.

Read the PRBA’s full letter here

Sean Murray is the President and Chief Editor of deBanked and the founder of the Broker Fair Conference. Connect with me on LinkedIn or follow me on twitter. You can view all future deBanked events here.