Following an audit, the Federal Housing Finance Agency Acting Inspector General Phyllis Fong is calling for an annual review of the contingency planning that’s in place for a broadly-used housing finance dataset.
The audit found that the regulator did ensure contingency plans and backup facilities were in place, but didn’t regularly look at how well the government-sponsored enterprises’ National Mortgage Database, and Correspondence Tracking System would fare if a disaster occurred.
“The FHFA did not review or test the NMDB contingency plan annually,” the acting inspector general said in a Dec. 13 report.
Also, while the agency does test the contingency plan for its general support system each year, — and said the correspondence tracking system “inherits” that plan — the audit found that the procedure involved “did not include CTS or its servers.”
The FHFA agreed in a memo from Chief Information Officer Kevin Smith to complete all the recommendations in the inspector general’s report.
These recommendations included conducting an assessment to determine whether the agency’s Office of Information and Technology has the resources it needs to “update, test and execute the contingency plan requirements.” The FHFA also promised to conduct an annual review and test of the National Mortgage Database, and modify the general support system plan to include the CTS.
The FHFA agreed to complete all these recommended actions by Dec. 1, 2022.
The IG’s office also has been auditing other types of information security at the FHFA. A previous audit focused on protocols around counterparty performance data sharing.
