CFPB Issues Revised Supervisory Appeals Process
Streamlined rule details how financial institutions can appeal findings from supervisory examinations
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a procedural rule updating the process by which financial institutions can appeal supervisory findings. The updated rule broadens the CFPB officials eligible to evaluate appeals, the options for resolving an appeal, the matters subject to appeal, and makes additional clarifying changes.
The CFPB examines financial institutions for compliance with federal consumer financial law, and can help identify issues before they become systemic or cause significant harm. As with other supervisory agencies, CFPB examinations are confidential. The CFPB periodically publishes Supervisory Highlights, which share summaries of examiners’ findings without naming specific institutions.
The changes in today’s updated appeals process include:
The Supervision Director will select an appeals committee of three CFPB managers with relevant expertise who did not work on the matter being appealed, and who will advise the Supervision Director in conjunction with attorneys assigned by the CFPB’s General Counsel.The appeals committee will now be able to remand a matter to Supervision staff for consideration of a modified finding, in addition to the existing options of upholding or rescinding the finding.Institutions may now file an appeal of any compliance rating or finding, not only an adverse rating.
The CFPB’s original supervisory appeals process was modeled after the processes of the prudential banking regulators and was last updated in 2015. The updated process issued today reflects changes to the CFPB’s organizational structure and is informed by the prudential regulators’ recent changes to their respective processes.