In remunerating borrowers, the Bureau thus faced a dilemma. Political exigency required the Bureau to design a process that would ensure that a sufficient number of alleged victims would be identified as eligible claimants; after all, if fewer claimants received checks than Director Cordray initially announced, the validity of the Bureau’s disparate impact methodology would be called into question. But, as internal documents reveal, Bureau officials knew that in order to generate a sufficient number of check recipients, they would have to remove a number of safeguards from the claims process, including confirming the race of claimants alleged to have been discriminated against, thus making it more likely that non-minority consumers would receive remuneration. Sending remuneration checks to white borrowers as a means of remedying alleged discrimination against African-American, Hispanic, and Asian borrowers is an unorthodox approach to fair lending enforcement, to say the least, and suggests significant problems with the Bureau’s actions against vehicle finance companies. However, confronted with such a dilemma, the Bureau chose to save face by engineering its desired result rather than implementing a claims process reasonably designed to identify alleged victims and discourage fraud.
http://financialservices.house.gov/uploadedfiles/cfpb_indirect_auto_part_ii.pdf