Fair Lending Law Developments

Data published in 1998 pursuant to the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act showed that applications for home purchase loans by African-Americans, Hispanics, and Native Americans continued to be denied at substantially higher rates than those of white applicants. This data and other information indicated that many minorities continued to experience difficulty in obtaining access to consumer credit, despite general prosperity and economic growth in the nation as a whole. But a potentially significant development for consumer creditors was the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System's notice of possible amendments to Regulation, under the Equal Credit Opportunity Act. Some of these amendments appear designed to address difficulties that government agencies and consumer representatives claim to have experienced in detecting and proving fair lending violations.