Bank of America (BAC) has been fined by federal regulators for not collecting information that’s meant to help the government combat mortgage lending discrimination.

The country’s second-largest consumer bank has agreed to pay a $12 million fine to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the government’s consumer watchdog agency, for not asking mortgage applicants their race, ethnicity, and sex, and then saying the applicants didn’t provide that information, the bureau said Tuesday.12

A federal law passed in 1975, the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, requires mortgage lenders to collect demographic information from applicants and pass it along to regulators, to help identify possible patterns of discrimination among other things. The law was intended to combat racial prejudice in home lending, a longstanding problem in the financial services world.

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