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The first 2024 issue of Consumer Compliance Outlook has been released, and is available on the Federal Reserve System’s Consumer Compliance Outlook webpage. Included in this issue are articles on:

• Overview of Private Flood Insurance Compliance Requirements
• Consumer Compliance Requirements for Commercial Products and Services
• Compliance Spotlight: Resources to Combat Increased Check Fraud
• Recent Supervisory Data for Institutions the Federal Reserve Supervises
• and more

Yesterday, the Treasury Department announced actions to further degrade Russia’s ability to sustain its war machine, continuing a multilateral campaign to limit the Kremlin’s revenue and access to the materiel it needs to prosecute its illegal war against Ukraine. Yesterday’s actions target Russia’s military-industrial base and chemical and biological weapons programs as well as companies and individuals in third countries that help Russia acquire key inputs for weapons or defense-related production. Nearly 300 targets were sanctioned by Treasury and the Department of State, including sanctions on dozens of actors that have enabled Russia to acquire technology and equipment from abroad.

In addition to the nearly 200 targets sanctioned by the Department of the Treasury, the Department of State has imposed sanctions on over 80 entities and individuals that are engaged in sanctions evasion and circumvention or are related to Russia’s chemical and biological weapons programs and defense industrial base. The Department of State also targeted Russia’s revenue generation through its future energy, metals, and mining production and sanctioning additional individuals in connection with the death of opposition leader and anticorruption activist Aleksey Navalny. For more information on State actions, see the Department of State Fact Sheet.

Today’s action includes nearly 60 targets located in Azerbaijan, Belgium, the PRC, Russia, Slovakia, Türkiye, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), that enable Russia to acquire desperately-needed technology and equipment from abroad.

For the names and identification information of the designated individuals, entities, and vessels, see the May 1, 2024, BankersOnline OFAC Update.

The Federal Housing Finance Agency has announced that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (the Enterprises) published new Reconsideration of Value (ROV) policies after months of collaboration with FHFA and the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) Federal Housing Administration. A Reconsideration of Value is a request to an appraiser to re-assess the appraised value of a property due to potential appraisal reporting deficiencies or inappropriate selection of comparable properties, or based upon additional information the appraiser should consider.

In June 2023, as part of the Interagency Task Force on Property Appraisal and Valuation Equity, FHFA and HUD established a working group to develop consistent ROV standards. The Enterprises’ new policies provide clear requirements for lenders to disclose and outline the ROV process for consumers, standardize communication to appraisers, and establish ROV response expectations. Lenders will also be required to refer appraisers to local, state, and federal agencies for violations of anti-discrimination laws.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development, through the FHA, announced a new FHA requirement for lenders participating in its Single Family program that will enable borrowers to request a re-assessment of the appraised value of their property if they believe that the appraisal was inaccurate or biased.

• Fannie Mae Selling Guide Announcement
• Freddie Mac Bulletin
• FHA ROV Mortgagee Letter

The CFPB yesterday released an issue spotlight report, Health Savings Accounts, detailing the complex costs and fees that many consumers with health savings accounts are forced to pay. The report indicates there were approximately 36 million health savings accounts in 2023 – holding more than $116 billion. These accounts provide tax benefits to help offset the costs of high deductible health plans. However, these benefits are being offset by charges like monthly maintenance fees, paper statement fees, outbound transfer fees, and account closure fees.

According to the CFPB, consumers have reported a range of concerns with health savings accounts. For some consumers, these accounts come with high costs. Employers often decide on the financial service provider that will manage employees’ health savings accounts. The factors that motivate employers can differ from those of employees. Providers design health savings accounts to compete for employers. The result is that health savings accounts can often present challenges and costs for consumers, such as surprise fees, lack of fund portability, and low-yield interest rates.

Yesterday, SBA Administrator Isabel Casilla Guzman announced a new rule that will remove restrictions on SBA loan programs that currently prevent many returning citizens, including those on parole and probation, from being eligible for SBA-backed loans to start or grow a business. As part of this rule change, the SBA will also remove questions on criminal history from its applications. Individuals who are currently incarcerated and those who have previously defrauded the government will remain ineligible.

In addition to removing restrictions on loan programs for the returning citizen population – including the nearly 4 million Americans on parole or probation – the final rule will also standardize most criminal history eligibility rules across SBA loan programs, which collectively provide more than $40 billion in capital annually to small businesses. The rule change will have no negative impact on the loan repayment process, and the SBA will continue to diligently perform fraud checks on all loan applications in accordance with its Risk Mitigation Framework. Lenders will also continue to evaluate individual loan applications for approval. In that context, lenders can evaluate criminal history on an individualized basis—as part of the full review of a loan application and consistent with federal, state, and local law. Lenders can deny loans based on evidence of an unacceptable credit risk.

No link to the new rule was provided with the press release.

The CFPB on Tuesday published research that suggests consumers tend to pay more for products that have more complex pricing structures. The report is based on experiments with multiple rounds of buyers and sellers interacting in simple markets, and found that participants tended to pay more when prices were broken into sub-parts and were harder to understand. The research, said the CFPB, has implications for understanding how junk fees impede fair and competitive pricing in markets like auto loans or mortgages, where consumers have to evaluate extended warranties, add-ons, closing costs, and a wide variety of other fees instead of an all-inclusive price.

While not expected to exactly mirror real-world transactions, the CFPB found in these experiments that more complex pricing generally led to more detrimental outcomes for consumers:

• Higher total prices: Sellers' total asking prices were 60 percent higher in markets with 16 sub-prices than in those with one price.
• Comparing prices was more difficult: Buyers were 15 times more likely to select a higher-priced option in markets with 16 sub-prices than in those with one price.
• Consumers paid more overall: Transaction prices were 70 percent higher in markets with 16 sub-prices than in those with one price, on average.

The CFPB has previously highlighted how the use of complex terms and pricing can pose challenges for consumers. In many instances, consumers face complex pricing when shopping for financial products and services including credit cards, checking and savings accounts, mortgages, and auto loans.

• Price Complexity in Laboratory Markets

The Federal Bureau of Investigation yesterday reported the elder fraud complaints to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) increased by 14 percent in 2023, and associated losses increased by about 11 percent, according the IC3’s 2023 Elder Fraud Report, released yesterday. Five takeaways from the report:

• Elder fraud is an expensive crime. Scams targeting individuals aged 60 and older caused over $3.4 billion in losses in 2023—an increase of approximately 11% from the year prior. The average victim of elder fraud lost $33,915 due to these crimes in 2023.
• Older Americans seem to be disproportionately impacted by scams and fraud. Over 101,000 victims aged 60 and over reported this kind of crime to IC3 in 2023. On the flip side, victims under the age of 20 years old seemed to be the least-impacted demographic, with about 18,000 victims in this demographic reporting suspected scams or frauds to IC3 last year.
• Tech support scams were the most widely reported kind of elder fraud in 2023. Nearly 18,000 victims aged 60 and over reported such scams to IC3. Personal data breaches, confidence and romance scams, non-payment or non-delivery scams, and investment scams rounded out the top five most common types of elder fraud reported to IC3 last year.
• Investment scams were the costliest kind of elder fraud in 2023. These schemes cost victims more than $1.2 billion in losses last year. And tech support scams, business email compromise scams, confidence and romance scams, government impersonation scams, and personal data breaches all respectively cost victims hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023.
• Scammers are coming for people’s cryptocurrency. More than 12,000 victims aged 60 and over indicated that cryptocurrency was “a medium or tool used to facilitate” the scam or fraud that targeted them when reporting it to IC3.