The Wall Street Journal says after realizing their methodology was inaccurate, they then tried to cover it up. A memo from May 2013, prepared for Director Richard Cordray, said as long as information never got out about how they were guessing ethnicities of borrowers, “our internal methodological deliberations will not be discoverable,” as in, the law-abiding taxpayers being sued will not learn the false basis for the legal action. Seeking several hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements, and smearing reputations is no small matter either.
The Nov. 2014 case against Honda Finance and others was authorized by Cordray even after a lender informed the agency that using the CFPB’s proxy methodology on borrowers whose racial identity was known, only 54 percent of those identified as African-American borrowers were, in fact, African-American.
Having been stalling on House requests for information, the bureau initially said they could not verify the authenticity of the document, and, as wsj tells MHProNews, says, “A week later the bureau was still giving us the same story, without producing any evidence to suggest the documents aren’t legitimate. The bureau is doing further damage to its credibility—if it had any left.” However, banking committees are seemingly in no hurry to act.
The wsj article closes: “This illegal guessing game of name-that-race underscores how much antidiscrimination law has become a political shakedown, and how the consumer bureau is a lawless body that needs to be reined in if it can’t be eliminated.” ##
(Image credit: getoutofdebt.org/Steve Rhodes)
