One Compliance Officer Went From 7 State Exams a Year to 12 — Is Your Team Ready?
"Institutions are seeing more state exams than perhaps ever before," said Melissa Grindel, EVP and head of compliance and product at ActiveComply. "One lender I spoke with last week noted that in 2024 they had seven state exams open at any given time, but this year, it's 12 right now" (National Mortgage Professional).
It's Not Just More Exams. It's Bigger Ones.
The volume increase is only half the story. Amanda Tucker, chief risk and compliance officer at Atlantic Bay Mortgage Group, noted that exam requests themselves have grown substantially in scope: "What was perhaps five pages before is now 20." A multistate lender isn't just fielding more examinations, each one is asking for meaningfully more documentation than it used to.
Why a Single National Playbook No Longer Works
With each state asserting greater independence in how it regulates, from advertising standards to remote-work guidance to compensation disclosure requirements, a single, national compliance policy is no longer sufficient. Compliance teams now need to map their operational footprint against every applicable state rule, train staff on state-specific expectations, and keep documentation centralized and audit-ready across every jurisdiction where they operate.
What This Means for Back-Office Staffing Specifically
Back-office work sits right at the center of this pressure. Files move through multiple state-specific requirements at once, disclosure timing, licensing nuances, documentation standards, and a support team that isn't actively tracking state-by-state changes is a real liability the moment an exam request lands. This is exactly the kind of scope that's hard for a lean in-house team to keep current on top of daily file volume.
Why This Favors a Structured, Compliance-Trained Staffing Model
A staffing model built around directly employed specialists, operating inside a documented, GLBA-aligned compliance framework, is structurally better positioned to absorb this than an internal team juggling compliance tracking alongside everything else. Specialization here isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a brokerage that can produce clean, current documentation the moment an examiner asks, and one scrambling to reconstruct it under a deadline.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much has the number of state exams grown for mortgage lenders? One compliance officer's example cited by National Mortgage Professional went from seven open state exams in 2024 to twelve currently, reflecting a broader industry trend toward increased state-level scrutiny.
Are exam requests themselves getting more detailed, or just more frequent? Both. Beyond the volume increase, exam requests have grown in scope as well, with one compliance officer noting requests that used to run about five pages now commonly run around twenty.
Why does this favor a structured staffing partner over a loosely managed one? A staffing partner built around directly employed specialists and a documented compliance framework can track state-by-state changes more consistently than an internal team, or a loosely contracted arrangement, trying to keep up alongside daily file volume.
Work with a staffing partner built to stay current on multistate compliance. Contact BrokerVA.