A deeper integration of Freddie Mac and LoanBeam's technologies will be followed by an expansion of the representation and warranty relief available to lenders originating loans to self-employed borrowers.

The expanded relief on tax income data will become accessible this fall, according to a press release LoanBeam issued this week during Freddie Mac's Connect client conference.

The new integration provides an early verification of income directly from the Internal Revenue Service in conjunction with income calculations LoanBeam provides for lenders. Freddie will offer the relief if the data can be verified. Loan Beam will charge an additional fee for the verification.

"Currently the rep and warranty relief given to lenders on income calculations is given on the assumption that the data is correct," said Roby Robertson, a senior vice president at LoanBeam. "This bounces the data that we've extracted from the tax returns against the IRS tax data, and validates it."

The move comes two years after Freddie initially launched an integration with LoanBeam that gave lenders selling loans to the government-sponsored enterprise access to rep and warrant relief on income calculations. The vendor runs those calculations after extracting data from documents using optical character recognition.

Freddie has said it is open to approving other vendors for similar functions if they meet a set of criteria it has, but has been having trouble finding other vendors that meet its standards.

Mortgage lenders are eager to obtain more relief from their responsibility to rep and warrant that the data points on loans they submit to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae are accurate.

That's particularly true now, because Fannie and Freddie tend to issue more requests to lenders to buy back loans based on flawed data when there is a relatively higher level of loan performance risk in the market.