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The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has ordered Bank of America to pay a $12 million penalty for falsely reporting mortgage applicants’ data from 2016 to 2020.

The bureau said BofA loan officers did not ask mortgage applicants demographic questions such as race, ethnicity and sex in four years, as required by the law, and instead falsely recorded that the applicants chose not to provide the information.

It said that the bank also failed to correct the loan officers in their conduct, turning a blind eye despite knowing the situation.

“For example, the bank identified that many loan officers receiving applications by phone were failing to collect the required data as early as 2013, but the bank turned a blind eye for years despite knowledge of the problem,” the bureau stated.

CFPB said that BofA violated the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, Regulation C, and the Consumer Financial Protection Act of 2010. The $12 million will go into CFPB’s victims relief fund.

“Bank of America violated a federal law that thousands of mortgage lenders have routinely followed for decades,” CFPB Director Rohit Chopra said in a statement. “It is illegal to report false information to federal regulators, and we will be taking additional steps to ensure that Bank of America stops breaking the law.”

The bureau said that BofA had four other violations in the past. In July this year, CFPB ordered BofA to pay over $200 million for illegally charging “junk” fees, withholding credit card rewards and opening fake accounts.

In 2022, CFPB and OCC ordered the bank to pay $225 million in fines and refund hundreds of millions of dollars to consumers for botched disbursement of state unemployment benefits. That same year, BofA also paid a $10 million penalty for unlawful garnishments of customer accounts.

Also in 2014, the CFPB ordered Bank of America to pay $727 million to consumers for illegal and deceptive credit card marketing practices.