WASHINGTON—While NCUA Chairman Debbie Matz and board member Mark McWatters have gone public with their differences over a number of issues, as CUToday.info is reporting here, CUNA said today it will not be picking any sides in that debate.
“Our response to that is that the better course of action is to focus on the substance of getting improvements in the revised risk-based RBC proposal and to not be distracted by extraneous issues,” said CUNA General Counsel Mary Dunn. “
When asked about the issue at the center of the board members’ disagreement, the strength of the legal support for the two-tiered risk-based capital proposal, Dunn said, “We do think that the agency’s authority for developing a two-tier risk-based capital component system is not based on the best reading of the Federal Credit Union Act, and we are not backing away from that. However, looking at the legality, we have to look at the impact on credit unions of the new proposal, and the new proposal will have a much less of an impact on credit unions, and it’s harder in court to prevail when that is the case, even if you are right on the law. We don’t want to get distracted on issues that at the end of the ay we don’t think will help credit unions that much.”
Separately, CUNA’s Bill Hampel said the association is preparing to introduce a new calculator to the “Risk-Based Capital Action Plan” resources it has on its website for affiliated credit unions. Among those new tools will be a risk-based capital calculator that will automatically import data from a credit union’s 5300 Call Report so that the CU can see how it’s capital is measured currently, how it would have been measured under NCUA’s first risk-based capital plan, and how it will be measured under the revised plan.
The new tool also includes instructions and suggestions for modifying a credit union’s numbers to see how those changes would affect ratios under the revised risk-based capital plan.
“Credit unions should find this very helpful,” said Hampel.