Elizabeth Whitehead, the NCUA's associate regional director of programs in Region I, was named by the board to be the Director of Region V. Whitehead, who began at the agency in 1988 as a district examiner, will be running an office with supervisory oversight of 480 federal credit unions with $57.6 billion located in Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming and Guam. Region V is headquartered in Tempe, Ariz.
She succeeds Jane Walters, who has served as acting regional director since last March and now returns to her position as director of region II. The last permanent director of region V was Melinda Love, who became director of the agency's Office of Examination and Insurance last March.
Earlier in her career at the NCUA, Whitehead was a senior supervision analyst and principal examiner. Before she joined the agency, Whitehead was CEO of Hurlbut Employees FCU in South Lee, Mass.
In a separate action, the NCUA issued a legal opinion letter that said federal credit unions can process residential mortgage loans from other credit unions, buy them and sell them to Freddie Mac.
NCUA Associate General Counsel Sheila Albin wrote that under the agency's "incidental powers rule, correspondent services are a preapproved incidental powers activity and include loan processing and loan servicing."
In the letter, which was written to Washington attorney William J. Donovan, she wrote that the federal credit union must comply with all NCUA regulations, policies and legal opinions. The smaller credit union must fund the loans and the loans must be closed in its name. When the federal credit unions pools the loans to sell to Freddie Mac, a pool must include a "substantial portion" of its own loans and the pool must be sold promptly, Albin wrote.
--cmarx@cutimes.com
