AMI wants lenders to check income plausibility with ONS
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The Association of Mortgage Intermediaries is calling on the regulator to allow lenders to verify borrowers’ incomes by using employment data collected by the Office for National Statistics.
Speaking at the Mortgage Expo held at Olympia in London last week, AMI director Rob Sinclair said he thought that the regulator would be open to the idea of lenders checking a borrower’s inc- ome against regional data on earnings for a given profession to see whether it was plausible or not.
Sinclair said: “I am not quite sure that the FSA genuinely means that they want a pay slip for every customer.
“If a taxi driver in New- castle says that his income is £40,000, then that may be plausible, so how much further do you have to go? If that same taxi driver says his income is £80,000, that is probably implausible and therefore it will need something else.
“So, the debate that lenders are going to have to have with the regulator is, do their current models give enough comfort that the data coming out of the Office for National Statistics for validating income is adequate? If that is the case, then we will not have this vast paper chase.”
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