Citi paid $24.5 million to the CFPB for what the agency’s own acting director now calls “rogue conduct by a few underwriters at one location.” Russell Vought penned a letter to Sen. Adam Schiff this week defending the early termination of a 2023 consent order against Citi, killed three years ahead of its scheduled end date.
The order alleged Citi denied credit card products to applicants with Armenian surnames ending in “ian” or “yan” between 2015 and 2021, then instructed employees not to discuss the practices in writing or on recorded phone lines. Vought’s letter, reviewed by Banking Dive, argues the impact “was not even detectable in any statistical analysis.”
The numbers tell an odd story. Citi paid $1,370,207.16 in actual redress to the 447 consumers who cashed their checks; the 126 uncashed checks were redistributed among those same recipients. The $24.5 million civil penalty was 17 times that total. Of the 573 individuals sent checks, more than 100 weren’t Armenian, including people named “Christian” or “Bryan.”
Schiff called the early termination “outrageous overreach” and demanded answers last month. Vought’s response: Citi fired the employees involved after the CFPB’s investigative demand in July 2020, retrained all underwriting staff, and met every compliance obligation before the order was cut.
“There are no unfulfilled obligations as of the date of termination,” Vought wrote. Citi declined to comment. Schiff’s office didn’t respond.
Marcus Webb