Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council

The Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council (FFIEC) is a formal U.S. government interagency body that includes five banking regulators—the Federal Reserve Board of Governors (FRB), the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). It is "empowered to prescribe uniform principles, standards, and report forms...to promote uniformity in the supervision of financial institutions". It also oversees real estate appraisal in the United States. Its regulations are contained in title 12 of the Code of Federal Regulations.

History

FFIEC was established March 10, 1979, pursuant to title X of the Financial Institutions Regulatory and Interest Rate Control Act of 1978 (FIRA).

Housing and real estate

The FFIEC was given additional statutory responsibilities by section 340 of the Housing and Community Development Act of 1980 to facilitate public access to data that depository institutions must disclose under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 (HMDA) and the aggregation of annual HMDA data, by census tract, for each metropolitan statistical area (MSA). In accordance with HMDA, the FFIEC established an advisory State Liaison Committee composed of five representatives of state supervisory agencies. The HMDA requires "most lenders to identify the race, sex, and income of loan applicants and borrowers", so the FFIEC is able to deduce thing like "the number of mortgages issued to black and Hispanic borrowers rose sharply", as it did in 1993. In 2006, the State Liaison Committee was added to the Council as a voting member.