Credit union call reports are overly burdensome, confusing and collect questionable material, credit union trade groups told the NCUA Friday.
And agency staff often cannot answer questions about the reports, CUNA and NAFCU said in response to the agency's request for information about how to improve the call report process.
In June, the NCUA asked for credit unions to evaluate the process. The month before, NCUA Chairman Rick Metsger announced that the agency would be working on a call report modernization project.
Recommended For You
As part of the process, CUNA conducted a survey of member credit unions to gather their input on the process, according to Andrew T. Price, CUNA's senior director of advocacy and counsel.
"Credit unions see substantial room for improvement in call reports as well as in the reporting process," Price wrote in a letter to the NCUA.
He said 70% of the respondents said call report requirements should be changed to better reflect credit union size and complexity.
That survey found 22% of the credit unions said they don't have adequate time to prepare the reports. While the amount of time needed to prepare the reports varied, on average, credit unions reported spending 2.5 days working on the report.
Some 27% of the credit unions said their credit union spends an unreasonable amount of time preparing quarterly reports, with 44% saying requirements did not take into account the limited resources available to small credit unions.
Only 23% of the credit unions said the report's instructions are easy to understand and 32% said agency staff provides consistently correct answers on report instructions.
Michael Emancipator, NAFCU's senior regulatory affairs counsel, said the NCUA should only collect information that is required by law and related to the safety and soundness of the industry.
"NAFCU believes the call report should be used in assisting [the] NCUA in its performance of supervisory duties, and is not intended as a vessel to capture or develop policy or market research," he wrote.
He said, for example, that NAFCU questions the need to collect field of membership information as part of the call report process.
Emancipator also said the association supports moving the due date for call reports to the last day of the month to allow for consistency and to provide credit unions with the most amount of time to prepare the reports.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
