A recent audit of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) found that it was doing a good job in general in its role of regulatory rule-maker.  The Office of Inspector General (OIG) of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors under which CFPB operates, conducted the audit, officially designated as an "evaluation to assess the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's compliance with section 1100G of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (Dodd-Frank Act)."  

The audit was conducted under the Regulatory Flexibility Act which requires federal agencies to analyze the impact of their regulatory actions on small entities.  In this case the CFPB is required to conduct regulatory flexibility analyses to assess the impact of any proposed rule on the cost of credit for small businesses and to convene panels to give them direct input from small businesses before issuing certain rules.

OIG found that overall the Bureau had complied with the requirements above as well as with two interim policy and procedures documents issued by the CFPB's Division of Research, Markets, and Regulations (RMR).   Of the six new rules that CFPB had issued under the Dodd-Frank Act, OIG found that the rulemaking process had included the required analysis for both the proposed and final rules.

The audit did find a few flaws and issued recommendations to correct them.  They faulted CFPB for not updating or finalizing the RMR's interim policies and procedures after two years of use (something that CFPB completed shortly after the audit and before the report was issued), and found that the policies and procedures gave the rule-making teams a level of discretion in their approach to regulatory analysis which contributed "to a variance in documentation and inconsistent knowledge transfer practices."

Finally, OIG found that RMR uses an inconsistent approach to storing supporting documentation related to 1100G rulemakings. The Bureau has an agency-wide records management policy that obligates the agency to maintain readily accessible records but RMR did not prescribe a formal structure to catalog RMR's records; thus, retrieving documents in response to requests was time consuming.