Washington Federal Bank, N.A., already under a 2013 consent order addressing violations of Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) reporting requirements, must pay a $200,000 civil money penalty and beef up its compliance management related to later violations under a consent order announced October 27th by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

In the new consent order, the CFPB said that Washington Federal Bank, headquartered in Seattle, Wash., violated HMDA, its implementing regulation (Regulation C), and the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010 (CFPA) by failing to report accurate data related to mortgage loan applications in 2016 and 2017. The bank reported HMDA data for more than 7,000 mortgage applications each of those years, the bureau said, which pointed to “significant” errors and said some samples had error rates as high as 40%.

“The occurrence of errors in many different fields, rather than concentrated in one or two fields, indicates broad [compliance management system] failures and a lack of adequate resources, because the errors were not caught, and the errors cannot be directly attributed to one or two systemic failures,” the bureau said in the order.

Further, the agency said it found that the errors in the bank’s 2016 HMDA data were caused by a lack of appropriate staff, insufficient staff training, and ineffective quality control, and that the errors in its 2017 HMDA data were directly related to weaknesses in Washington Federal’s compliance-management system. The bureau said weaknesses were specifically found in board and management oversight, monitoring, and policies and procedures.

HMDA data is used by the CFPB and other regulators to examine and identify fair-lending violations. Inaccurate data can make it hard for regulators and the public to root out discrimination in mortgage lending, the CFPB said in a press release.