On May 18, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) announced they will reconsider the June 2020 final rule regarding Community Reinvestment Act regulations. As previously noted, the OCC acted on its own in implementing the final rule leaving the banking industry without a common approach to complying with CRA regulations. At that time, NMHC requested that the banking regulators – OCC, Federal Reserve (Fed) , Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) – jointly move forward with new regulations.
The announcement covered a number of specific aspects of the OCC’s final rule:
The OCC has determined that it will reconsider the June 2020 rule. While this reconsideration is ongoing, the OCC will not object to the suspension of the development of systems for, or other implementation of, provisions with a compliance date of January 1, 2023, or January 1, 2024, under the 2020 CRA rule. At this time, the OCC also does not plan to finalize the December 4, 2020, proposed rule that requested comment on an approach to determine the CRA evaluation measure benchmarks, retail lending distribution test thresholds, and community development minimums under the June 2020 rule.
Of note, earlier this year NMHC the Federal Reserve issued its own Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPR) for modernizing CRA. In a comment letter, submitted by NMHC on February 10, a request was made for the banking regulators to jointly move forward with new regulations.
The announcement by the OCC is a positive signal that the banking regulators will jointly work on developing new CRA regulations that will uniformly apply to the depository industry.
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