Supporting borrowers with Limited English Proficiency (LEP)

Many government agencies have recently issued guidance and provided resources to assist financial institutions in serving consumers with Limited English Proficiency (LEP). The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) issued a bulletin in January of 2021, Fannie Mae (FNMA) and Freddie Mac (FHLMC) are providing foreign language translation aids for their uniform instruments, and last month The Federal Housing Administration (FHA) has made more than 30 foreign language mortgage documents and resources available to support origination of FHA-insured mortgages.

For many years Docutech has provided resources to comply with state laws that require disclosures to be provided to consumers when part of the transaction is negotiated in certain foreign languages. We are expanding our document library to further support LEP consumers by providing the uniform instrument Spanish translation aides published by FNMA and FHLMC.

FNMA and FHLMC have been focused on helping lenders support borrowers with limited English proficiency by publishing multi-language resources for lenders. These resources are being published in Spanish, Korean, Tagalog, Traditional Chinese, and Vietnamese as a resource for the industry and are designed for borrower convenience to be used as a translation aid to help LEP consumers better understand the terms of their loan. They are not intended to be executed and are for reference purposes only.

Docutech is pleased to announce we are expanding our resources available to support LEP borrowers. The first step in this expansion is to provide the Spanish translated uniform instruments provided by FNMA and FHLMC. These documents can be added to a lender's document package based on indicators sent from the LOS and will be presented in the document package as an aid to help Spanish-speaking borrowers better understand the terms of their loan. These documents do not appear with any loan-specific data and include a notice that the document is not legally binding and is provided for the borrower’s convenience.

We look forward to continuing to expand our product offering to include more languages and documents as requested by our clients to support LEP borrowers. Our current plans are to provide these documents and resources as they are published by government agencies and authorities. 

Existing clients can reach out to their client relationship manager to discuss the next steps to add these new resources to your document packages.

Not a current client but interested in learning more? Contact us to get started.