State Licensing Efficiency Act of 2015

Floor Speech

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Mr. NEUGEBAUER. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 2643, offered by my good friend and fellow Texan, Mr. Williams, is commonsense bipartisan legislation that will address the unintended consequences of the SAFE Act.

This bill passed the Committee on Financial Services by a vote of 57-0. Before I get into the details of this bill, I would like to thank the Texas Banking Commissioner, Charles Cooper, for his help and guidance as the committee considered this legislation.

Mr. Speaker, H.R. 2643 helps ensure a safe consumer financial marketplace by facilitating the licensing of certain financial services providers.

Congress authorized the creation of the National Mortgage Licensing System and Registry, the NMLS, to provide a mechanism for licensing nationwide of financial services providers.

The mission of NMLS is to improve interstate coordination information sharing among regulators, increasing efficiencies for industry and enhanced consumer protection.

Currently, the greater utility NMLS is frustrated by the FBI's current statutory incapacity to enhance the platform by allowing additional financial service providers, other than mortgage loan originators, to be licensed under this system.

When processing licenses, authorized State regulating agencies should have access to the most up-to-date criminal background information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. For certain classes of financial providers, that is not occurring.

The FBI should not be hindered from bringing the same efficiency to the criminal background checks of financial services personnel that the NMLS brought to the mortgage loan originators.

By enabling the State license agencies to obtain these background checks, this bill will make the licensing process more efficient and potentially help qualified businesses get up and running more quickly.

By enhancing the authority to process criminal history records for licensing of financial service providers beyond mortgage loan originators, this bill ensures that State financial regulators have the necessary tools to exercise effective oversight.

Mr. Speaker, I want to be clear that this bill only affects financial services businesses which are already required to conduct background checks and which cannot currently use the NMLS system by Federal law.

H.R. 2643 has the potential to reduce the time it takes to complete background checks from anywhere between 2 days and 2 weeks to 24 hours under the expanded NMLS.

At the end of 2014, there were 20,386 professionals registered in the system. Nationwide there was a need to conduct over 105,000 background checks outside of the system.

It is estimated that this bill will reduce the number of background checks conducted outside the NMLS system by 80 percent and reduce the administrative and regulatory burden of State banking examiners to conduct them.

In closing, I want to make two points. First, no authority to conduct background checks is created by this legislation. Second, no new licensing requirements are created by this legislation.

I want to again thank the gentleman from Texas for his hard work.

Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

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