The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has terminated a pair of consent orders against Washington Federal, the bank announced this month in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Committee.
The regulator backed up the disclosure with notices of its own last week – though details were sparse.
The terminations each pertained to violations of the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act – one from October 2013, and the other seven years later.
Seattle-based WaFd “has fulfilled several obligations under the [2020] order, including, among other things, paying a civil money penalty of $200,000, and creating and implementing a compliance plan designed to ensure that its collection, recording, and reporting of HMDA data complies with applicable Federal consumer financial laws and the terms of the order,” the CFPB posted on its site Sept. 22.
The CFPB is ending WaFd’s compliance requirements five years early in the 2020 case, in which the regulator charged the bank a $200,000 penalty over erroneous mortgage data.
The 2013 order, meanwhile, forced WaFd to pay a $34,000 penalty over inaccurate data the bank reported about its mortgage transactions for 2011.
As with the 2020 case, the CFPB last week said WaFd “fulfilled several” of its “obligations,” including paying the penalty.
The twin terminations expand upon orders the CFPB has ended early. The bureau last week also indicated it terminated consent orders against U.S. Bank and Apple.
The CFPB in December 2023 had ordered U.S. Bank to pay $20.7 million after it froze the unemployment benefits of ReliaCard holders, forcing the customers – in the summer of 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic – to verify their identities to unfreeze their accounts.
The bureau said this month that U.S. Bank “has fulfilled certain obligations under the order,” including paying the $15 million civil money penalty, making required redress payments, “and taking steps to implement injunctive relief to prevent future violations.”
The order initially came with a five-year enhanced compliance and cooperation period, which the bureau is waiving more than three years ahead of time.
In a separate filing, the CFPB terminated a consent order it issued against Apple in October 2024, alleging the tech giant failed to send thousands of Apple Card consumer disputes to partner bank Goldman Sachs.
As with the other recent filings, the CFPB cited Apple’s payment of a $25 million penalty as reasoning behind ending the enforcement action more than four years ahead of the compliance and cooperation period and waiving any “alleged noncompliance.”
The CFPB ordered Goldman, in a related action last year, to pay at least $19.8 million in redress and a $45 million civil money penalty.
A search of CFPB paperwork linked to Goldman’s penalty in the case indicates that enforcement action is still open.
The CFPB, at the time, also banned the bank from launching another credit card “unless it can provide a credible plan that the product will actually comply with the law.”
The CFPB asserted that Goldman failed to properly investigate the disputes it did receive from Apple.
