With HMDA filing season about 2 weeks away, bureau urges use of ‘beta platform’ to test submissions

Filers of 2019 data related to home mortgages should use the “beta platform” to test the information they plan to file to ensure it will be accepted, the federal consumer financial protection agency said in letter Monday.

In its letter, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said filers of 2019 Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) data – which is due between Jan. 1 and March 1 of next year – are “encouraged” to use the beta platform “as a sandbox for pre-filing season testing.” To use the beta platform, filers should use their current HMDA login information, the agency said.

The letter also offers a number of “reminders and tips” for the 2020 filing season, including:

  • Registrants should not use their personal email to register for an account (rather, they should use an email address from the institution for which they are filing).
  • Registrants must use their institution’s “legal entity identifier” (LEI), tax ID, and agency code to file their data – and there should be no spaces in the LEI or Universal Loan Identifiers (ULI) throughout the file.
  • Before filing, registrants should review various regulatory resources and filing instruction guides available on the agency’s website to assist in filing preparation. (The CFPB also notes that the file formatting tools located on the FFIEC website do not check for compliance with HMDA edits; those tools only verify format structure.)
  • Before re-uploading a corrected file, registrants should clear their web browser cache.
  • If timeouts or other upload errors are encountered during file submission, the CFPB recommends that selected web URLs are whitelisted in the browser’s Data Loss Prevention (DLP) to allow for transfer of HMDA files. Among those URLS:

FFIEC HMDA Filing Frequently Asked Questions