[Federal Register Volume 80, Number 217 (Tuesday, November 10, 2015)]
[Notices]
[Pages 69664-69674]
From the Federal Register Online via the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
[FR Doc No: 2015-28483]


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FEDERAL HOUSING FINANCE AGENCY

[No. 2015-N-11]


Proposed Collection; Comment Request

AGENCY: Federal Housing Finance Agency.

ACTION: 60-day Notice of Submission of Information Collection for 
Approval from Office of Management and Budget.

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SUMMARY: In accordance with the requirements of the Paperwork Reduction 
Act of 1995, the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA) is seeking 
public comments concerning the information collection known as the 
``National Survey of Existing Mortgage Borrowers'' (NSEMB). This is a 
new collection that has not yet been assigned a control number by the 
Office of Management and Budget (OMB). FHFA intends to submit the 
information collection to OMB for review and approval of a three-year 
control number.

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DATES: Interested persons may submit comments on or before January 11, 
2016.

ADDRESSES: Submit comments to FHFA, identified by ``Proposed 
Collection; Comment Request: `National Survey of Existing Mortgage 
Borrowers, (No. 2015-N-11)' '' by any of the following methods:
     Agency Web site: www.fhfa.gov/open-for-comment-or-input.
     Federal eRulemaking Portal: http://www.regulations.gov. 
Follow the instructions for submitting comments. If you submit your 
comment to the Federal eRulemaking Portal, please also send it by email 
to FHFA at [email protected] to ensure timely receipt by the agency.
     Mail/Hand Delivery: Federal Housing Finance Agency, Eighth 
Floor, 400 Seventh Street SW., Washington, DC 20219, ATTENTION: 
Proposed Collection; Comment Request: ``National Survey of Existing 
Mortgage Borrowers, (No. 2015-N-11)''.
    We will post all public comments we receive without change, 
including any personal information you provide, such as your name and 
address, email address, and telephone number, on the FHFA Web site at 
http://www.fhfa.gov. In addition, copies of all comments received will 
be available for examination by the public on business days between the 
hours of 10 a.m. and 3 p.m., at the Federal Housing Finance Agency, 
Eighth Floor, 400 Seventh Street SW., Washington, DC 20219. To make an 
appointment to inspect comments, please call the Office of General 
Counsel at (202) 649-3804.

FOR FURTHER INFORMATION CONTACT: Forrest Pafenberg, Supervisory Policy 
Analyst, Office of the Chief Operating Officer, by email at 
[email protected] or by telephone at (202) 649-3129; or Eric 
Raudenbush, Assistant General Counsel, by email at 
[email protected] or by telephone at (202) 649-3084, (these are 
not toll-free numbers), Federal Housing Finance Agency, 400 Seventh 
Street SW., Washington, DC 20219. The Telecommunications Device for the 
Deaf is (800) 877-8339.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION:

A. Need for and Use of the Information Collection

    The NSEMB will be a periodic, voluntary survey of individuals who 
currently have a first mortgage loan secured by single-family 
residential property. The survey questionnaire will consist of 
approximately 80-85 questions designed to learn directly from mortgage 
borrowers about their mortgage experience, any challenges they may have 
had in maintaining their mortgage and, where applicable, terminating a 
mortgage. It will request specific information on: The mortgage; the 
mortgaged property; the borrower's experience with the loan servicer; 
and the borrower's financial resources and financial knowledge. FHFA is 
also seeking clearance to pretest the survey questionnaire and related 
materials from time to time through the use of focus groups. A 
preliminary draft of the survey questionnaire (which at this time 
includes only 66 questions) appears at the end of this notice.
    The NSEMB will be a component of the larger ``National Mortgage 
Database'' (NMDB) Project (Project), which is a multi-year joint effort 
of FHFA and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) (although 
the NSEMB is being sponsored only by FHFA). The Project is designed to 
satisfy the Congressionally-mandated requirements of section 1324(c) of 
the Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety and Soundness Act of 
1992, as amended by the Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008.\1\ 
Section 1324(c) requires that FHFA conduct a monthly survey to collect 
data on the characteristics of individual prime and subprime mortgages, 
and on the borrowers and properties associated with those mortgages in 
order to enable it to prepare a detailed annual report on the mortgage 
market activities of the Federal National Mortgage Association (Fannie 
Mae) and the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac) for 
review by the appropriate Congressional oversight committees. Section 
1324(c) also authorizes and requires FHFA to compile a database of 
timely and otherwise unavailable residential mortgage market 
information to be made available to the public.
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    \1\ 12 U.S.C. 4544(c).
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    In order to fulfill those and other statutory mandates, as well as 
to support policymaking and research efforts, FHFA and CFPB committed 
in July 2012 to fund, build and manage the NMDB Project. When fully 
complete, the NMDB will be a de-identified loan-level database of 
closed-end first-lien residential mortgages. It will: (1) Be 
representative of the market as a whole; (2) contain detailed, loan-
level information on the terms and performance of mortgages, as well as 
characteristics of the associated borrowers and properties; (3) be 
continually updated; (4) have an historical component dating back 
before the financial crisis of 2008; and (5) provide a sampling frame 
for surveys to collect additional information.
    The core data in the NMDB are drawn from a random 1-in-20 sample of 
all closed-end first-lien mortgage files outstanding at any time 
between January 1998 and the present in the files of Experian, one of 
the three national credit repositories. A random 1-in-20 sample of 
mortgages newly reported to Experian is added each quarter. The NMDB 
also draws information on mortgages in the NMDB datasets from other 
existing sources, including the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act (HMDA) 
database that is maintained by the Federal Financial Institutions 
Examination Council (FFIEC), property valuation models, and data files 
maintained by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and by federal agencies. 
Currently, FHFA obtains additional data from its quarterly National 
Survey of Mortgage Borrowers (NSMB), which provides critical and timely 
information on newly-originated mortgages and those borrowing that are 
not available from any existing source, including: The range of 
nontraditional and subprime mortgage products being offered, the 
methods by which these mortgages are being marketed, and the 
characteristics of borrowers for these types of loans.\2\
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    \2\ OMB has cleared the NSMB under the PRA and assigned it 
control no. 2590-0012. The current OMB clearance expires on December 
31, 2016.
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    While the quarterly NSMB provides information on newly-originated 
mortgages, it does not solicit borrowers' experience with maintaining 
their existing mortgages; nor is detailed information on that topic 
available from any other existing source. The NSEMB will solicit such 
information, including information on borrowers' experience with 
maintaining a mortgage under financial stress, their experience in 
soliciting financial assistance, their success in accessing federally-
sponsored programs designed to assist them, and, where applicable, any 
challenges they may have had in terminating a mortgage loan. The NSEMB 
questionnaire will be sent out to a stratified random sample of 10,000 
borrowers in the NMDB. The NSEMB assumes a 25 percent overall response 
rate, which would yield 2,500 survey responses.
    The information collected through the NSEMB questionnaire will be 
used, in combination with information obtained from existing sources in 
the NMDB, to assist FHFA in understanding how the performance of 
existing mortgages is influencing the residential mortgage market, what 
different borrower groups are discussing with their servicers when they 
are under financial stress, and

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consumers' opinions of federally-sponsored programs designed to assist 
them. This important, but currently unavailable, information will 
assist the agency in the supervision of its regulated entities (Fannie 
Mae, Freddie Mac, and the Federal Home Loan Banks) and in the 
development and implementation of appropriate and effective policies 
and programs. The information may also be used for research and 
analysis by other federal agencies that have regulatory and supervisory 
responsibilities/mandates related to mortgage markets and to provide a 
resource for research and analysis by academics and other interested 
parties outside of the government.
    FHFA expects that, in the process of developing the initial and any 
subsequent NSEMB survey questionnaires and related materials, it will 
sponsor one or more focus groups to pretest those materials. Such 
pretesting will ultimately help to ensure that the survey respondents 
can and will answer the survey questions and will provide useful data 
on their experiences with maintaining their existing mortgages. FHFA 
will use information collected through the focus groups to assist in 
drafting and modifying the survey questions and instructions, as well 
as the related communications, to read in the way that will be most 
readily understood by the survey respondents and that will be most 
likely to elicit usable responses. Such information will also be used 
help the agency decide on how best to organize and format the survey 
questionnaire.

B. Burden Estimate

    While FHFA currently has firm plans to conduct the survey only 
once--in the second quarter of 2016--it may decide to conduct further 
periodic NSEMB surveys once the first survey is completed. The agency 
therefore estimates that the survey will be conducted, on average, once 
annually over the next three years and that it will conduct pre-testing 
on each set of annual survey materials. FHFA has analyzed the hour 
burden on members of the public associated with pre-testing the survey 
materials (24 hours) and with conducting the survey (5,000 hours) and 
estimates the total annual hour burden imposed on the public by this 
information collection to be 5,024 hours. The estimate for each phase 
of the collection was calculated as follows:

Pre-Testing the Materials

    FHFA estimates that it will sponsor two focus groups prior to 
conducting each survey, with 12 participants in each focus group, for a 
total of 24 focus group participants. It estimates the participation 
time for each focus group participant to be one hour, resulting in a 
total annual burden estimate of 24 hours for the pre-testing phase of 
the collection (2 focus groups per year x 12 participants in each group 
x 1 hour per participant = 24 hours).

Conducting the Survey

    FHFA estimates that the NSEMB questionnaire will be sent to 10,000 
recipients each time it is conducted. Although the agency expects only 
2,500 of those surveys to be returned, it assumes that all of the 
surveys will be returned for purposes of this burden calculation. Based 
on the reported experience of respondents to the quarterly NSMB 
questionnaire, which contains a similar number of questions, FHFA 
estimates that it will take each respondent 30 minutes to complete each 
survey, including the gathering of necessary materials to respond to 
the questions. This results in a total annual burden estimate of 5,000 
hours for the survey phase of this collection (1 survey per year x 
10,000 respondents per survey x 30 minutes per respondent = 5,000 
hours).

C. Comment Request

    FHFA requests written comments on the following: (1) Whether the 
collection of information is necessary for the proper performance of 
FHFA functions, including whether the information has practical 
utility; (2) The accuracy of FHFA's estimates of the burdens of the 
collection of information; (3) Ways to enhance the quality, utility, 
and clarity of the information collected; and (4) Ways to minimize the 
burden of the collection of information on survey respondents, 
including through the use of automated collection techniques or other 
forms of information technology.

    Dated: November 3, 2015.
Kevin Winkler,
Chief Information Officer, Federal Housing Finance Agency.
BILLING CODE 8070-01-P

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[FR Doc. 2015-28483 Filed 11-9-15; 8:45 am]
BILLING CODE 8070-01-C