The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau asked earlier this year for comments from the real estate finance industry on the effectiveness of its 2013 Mortgage Servicing Rule.

Under Dodd-Frank, the CFPB must “use available evidence and data to assess all of its rules five years after they go into effect to ensure they are meeting the purposes and objectives of Dodd-Frank, and the specific goals of the subject rule,” Pavitra Bacon stated in a blog on the CFPB Monitor.

Earlier this year, it began doing just that.

This week, the Mortgage Bankers Association responded to the request.

The MBA submitted comments explaining the rule, which amended the Real Estate Settlement Procedures Act, “required mortgage servicers to spend millions of dollars and countless staff hours to come into compliance and it is appropriate to conduct an assessment of the rule, its costs and the resultant market outcomes.”

The final rule clarified and revised the 2013 RESPA Servicing Final Rule and the 2013 TILA Servicing Final Rule. It is set to go into effect on October 19, 2017.

“MBA feels strongly that this review should encompass both facets of the CFPB's statutory mandate: ensuring access to financial markets and that those markets are fair and transparent,” the MBA wrote in its blog. “Such an accounting will necessarily involve discussions of the costs required to implement the rule and the effect that such increased costs have had on access to consumer credit.”

“It should also involve an analysis of how CFPB's enforcement policy interacts with its supervisory role and whether a lack of regulatory clarity in this rule has reduced access to consumer credit,” it concluded.