In the report, GAO said that while most agencies conduct decennial reviews of their rules under the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act, those reviews have several shortcomings.

"Regulators do not assess the cumulative burden of the regulations they administer," the GAO said.

In addition, the CFPB– a key financial regulator– is not required to conduct the reviews.

Finally, unlike executive branch agencies, depository institution regulators are not required to analyze and report quantitative-based rationales for their responses to comments on rules.

GAO said that correcting these problems would "better ensure that all regulations relevant to community banks and credit unions were reviewed, likely improve the analyses the regulators perform, and potentially result in additional burden reduction."

In focus groups and interviews, representatives identified mortgage reporting requirements, the need to review transactions for illegal transactions and disclosing mortgage terms and costs to consumers as the most burdensome.

However, regulators and others said that the regulations are essential to preventing lending discrimination and the use of the banking system for illegal activities and that they were working to reduce regulatory burden.

Noting several specific problems, the GAO said that the CFPB issued guidance to educate institutions regarding mortgage disclosures. Nonetheless, GAO said that some compliance burdens resulted from a misunderstanding of the requirements—a problem that could have been solved by an evaluation of the effectiveness of the guidance.

And in examining the impact that regulations have on community banks and credit unions, the banking regulators no longer examine the impact of mortgage reporting requirements, since the CFPB now has jurisdiction over the rules, GAO said.

Most institutions also cited requirements anti-money laundering the Bank Secrecy Act reporting requirements as causing a large regulatory burden.,

"Representatives in all focus groups and a majority of interviews said BSA imposes financial costs on community banks and credit unions that must be absorbed by those institutions or passed along to customers," the GAO said.

However, officials from FinCEN said the reporting requirements were essential in investigating potentially illegal activities.

GAO said that the CFPB has formed an internal group to examine its regulations, but that the agency has not announced what regulations will be studied, the timing and frequency of the reviews and whether they will be coordinated with other financial regulators.

The GAO recommended that the NCUA should develop plans for conducting quantitative analyses of their rules and should examine opportunities to streamline regulations.

In a response to the GAO report, NCUA Executive Director Mark Treichel said the agency acknowledges that it should improve its quantitative analyses and develop plans for relieving regulatory burden.

He said that the NCUA has appointed a regulatory task force to develop a four-year plan for revising NCUA rules. That task force will consider the benefits and burdens of agency rules.