We know that we are required to collect age and marital status on loans subject to ECOA;ie: purchase of a primary residence; but if we collect the age and marital status on a loan that is not subject to ECOA, is this a violation? All of our applications have a place for age and marital status. Thanks.

By ECOA you are referring to 202.13(a), monitoring info?

You can still verify the age to ensure they are able to contract and in a community property state (as I am in TX) we can inquire as to marital status so we have more info as to asset ownership and possible liability of the applicant. (202.5(d))

Yes, that is the cite I am referring to. We are not a community property state (Ga.).

Anonymous: Look at 12 CFR 202.5.

We recently had an OCC examiner tell us that we couldn't ask for 'age' on our applications, but that it was perfectly OK to ask for date of birth. Can anyone tell what the rationale for that one is?!?!

That examiner was either trying to make a joke or should go back to Compliance 101 (Regulation Reading).

What he or she should have said is "You cannot consider age as an element of creditworthiness (except to determine the capacity to contract, etc.) and you cannot provide preferential treatment based on age (except if the applicant is at least 62)."

There is nothing wrong with asking an applicant's age in and of itself. It's not one of the "forbidden questions in §§202.5(c) and (d).

But we have long used DOB to assist in ID procedures, and since we still want that ability, we don't have to bother with asking age directly.

No joke - he was serious! I pointed out the same things you did, and he agreed, but his position (he made it sound like his superiors were pushing this, but I have my doubts) was that the age on the application would be just too tempting for the lender to use in discriminating against an applicant.

I know loan officers have their moments, but most of them can compute age fairly quickly in their heads from a birthdate.

I guess I would consider this battle not worth the effort unless you wanted to make it clear on a non-vital matter that you weren't going to accept a bogus recommendation.

Why not worth the effort? You've said it yourself, even a loan officer can figure age from a DOB. (All right, that's not how you said it!) So why not drop it from the application if it provides no true benefit?

Some of the model application forms in the Reg B Appendix use "Date of Birth" and some use "Age". You could always ask the examiner if he writes up the use of Reg B model forms as a violation.

Excellent observation, Ted. He’s right, the RE model form does have “age” requested.

If this was me (and the examiner is not “writing-it-up”) I might would say something similar to the examiner, like: “Thanks for brining this to our attention, we will certainly look into this issue.” Look into the issue and conclude that no change is needed.

I don’t think a review examiner would accept this for the final report.

You're right - it didn't make the final report. I told them we'd look into it and make any changes we needed to make. They've asked about it since then, but I've kind of blown them off. I will definitely put it to bed the next time I'm asked by pointing out the model form. Thanks for that bit of information!