HMDA Disclosure Requirements: What the Public Has the Right to See – and When

The HMDA regulations require HMDA reporters to make their loan application registers, or LARs, available for public review within specific time periods following submission of the LARs to their supervisory agencies. For each calendar year, a financial institution submits the HMDA-LAR to its regulatory agency by March 1, in automated format, unless there are 25 or fewer reportable transactions. The LAR itemizes reportable transactions on an application-by-application basis, as well as a loan-by-loan basis. Although lenders are not required to arrange transactions on the LAR in any particular fashion, they are strongly encouraged to make the data available in census tract order, if possible, to enhance their utility. The layout of the register must conform exactly to the register published by the Federal Reserve Board in Appendix A of Regulation C.

With respect to the 2004 reported data, lenders covered by HMDA were required to make price and other information about their home loans available to the public as early as March 31, 2005. An institution must release its HMDA-LAR to the public after deleting three fields; this redaction is done for privacy considerations. The deleted fields are: application or loan number; date on which the application was received; and the date on which action was taken. The “modified” LAR for a given year must be publicly available by March 31 of the following year for requests received on or before March 1, and within 30 days for requests received after March 1. An institution must make each modified LAR available for public review for three years.

On or about September 1 of this year, using data from an institution’s LAR, the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) will prepare and send to that institution, by CD-ROM, a series of tables that comprise the disclosure statement for the institution. The FFIEC has revised substantially the disclosure statements, primarily by adding a large number of new tables focusing on pricing data, requests for preapprovals, and manufactured home lending information. The FFIEC will publish a disclosure statement for each mortgage lender, cross-tabulating the individual loan data in various groupings, for each metropolitan area in which the lender conducts business.

In addition, the FFIEC will produce summary-level tables for every metropolitan statistical area (MSA) or metropolitan district (MD), which is a geographical subset of an MSA, that aggregates information about the different covered lenders’ activity in the area, as well as for the nation as a whole.

An institution must make its disclosure statement available to the public at its home office for inspection and copying, in printed or electronic form, within three business days of receipt from the FFIEC. An institution also must (1) make its disclosure statement available to the public in at least one branch office, in each additional MSA or MD in which it has offices, within 10 business days of receipt from the FFIEC, or (2) post the address to which requests should be directed in each branch office, in each additional MSA or MD in which it has offices, and it must send the disclosure statement within 15 calendar days after receiving a written request. Institutions may impose reasonable fees for the costs incurred in producing the data for public release. Each FFIEC disclosure statement is available for public review for five years.

The aggregate tables and the individual disclosure statements also are sent to central data depositories, typically public libraries or planning commission offices, in each MSA or MD. A directory of central data depositories is available from the FFIEC. For more information about the FFIEC tables, see http://www.ffiec.gov/hmda.