on applications where the right to cancel applies. Is it the best practice to use the date the Right to Cancel expires or the date of actual closing?

You have the choice, but need to be consistent, at least for each category of loans that you do. Here, we always use the loan date.

Normally that is what we have been using, but we had a loan closed on the last day of 2011 and since it had the right to cancel we did not record it in the 2011 LAR (I assume it was due to waiting on the right to cancel) I'm now doing the 1st quarter review of my HMDA LAR and picked it up. I guess for the rest of the year any refi we need to use the date when the right to cancel is up.

Our bank uses the disbursement date for our HMDA date of action for this exact reason.

I don't guess i understand.....unless you submitted your LAR on January 1, 2011, why would a 3 day rescission wait cause the loan to be left off your LAR?

The problem was that we had loans with closing date in year X and disbursement dates in year Y. We were using the closing date, but our LOS was using the disbursement date, so our production reports would miss those loans. By the time we found the discrepancy, we had already filed the LAR.

Oh.

Thank you. So many years reviewing the HMDA and I believe this is the first time I had this situation. I understand now why some banks report the disbursement day, they probably had this same experience. WE normally have very few LAR's in a year period.

We use the disbursement date as well, but note this sentence at the end of Comment 1004.4(a)(8)-6:

"Notwithstanding this flexibility regarding the use of the closing date in connection with reporting the date action was taken, the year in which an origination goes to closing is the year in which the institution must report the origination."

I've always understood this to mean that you can use the disbursement date, but for loans with ROR that close in one year and disburse in the next year, you report the loan on the LAR for the year that it closed in, not the year that it disbursed.

When we had our problems, we contacted HMDA Help and they told us that we could report in the year disbursed, as long as we were consistent.

You were given incorrect advice and it will subject you to CMPs if your regulator wants to push the issue.