The National Community Reinvestment Coalition (NCRC) is encouraging all to submit comments on the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s proposed rule on Section 1071 dealing with Small Business Lending Data Collection.
The deadline to submit comments is Thursday, January 6. This is an opportunity to take a stand to narrow racial and gender disparities in wealth and small business ownership.
NCRC has created a pair of sample comments and instructions that can guide you through the submission process.
Data drives the movement for economic justice. Without data on lending to women- and minority-owned small businesses, NCRC cannot advocate and work with lending institutions to identify and narrow racial and gender disparities in lending and wealth-building.
The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 included Section 1071, which mandated the collection and dissemination of data on applicants for loans to small businesses and women- and minority-owned firms. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was designated to collect the data. The statutory purpose of the data is to aid in the enforcement of fair lending laws and to assess whether the needs of the businesses targeted by the law are being met.
NCRC has worked on this data reporting for more than two decades. We worked with members of Congress as early as 2001 to introduce CRA modernization legislation that had previous versions of the Section 1071 data reporting requirements. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 adopted the data reporting, which became Section 1071. But NCRC, our members, allies, and members of Congress needed to keep advocating for several years until Section 1071 finally took shape in September 2021 with a CFPB notice of proposed rulemaking.