"Credit unions have it in their DNA to serve their communities," Elizabeth Eurgubian, CUNA's deputy chief advocacy officer and senior counsel, said.

Congress passed the CRA in 1977, as part of an effort to encourage banks to meet the credit needs of their communities, including low- and moderate-income communities. Federal banking regulators enforce the law by conducting examinations. In 1995, the law was tailored in an effort to account for the different sizes and business models.

Because credit unions are not included in the CRA, the law is administered by the Federal Reserve Board, the FDIC and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, but not the NCUA.

The Trump Administration has signaled its desire to revise the CRA's rules, but that effort may result in a loosening of rules rather than a tightening of them. And any effort to extend the CRA to credit unions would take congressional action.

Joseph Otting, the new comptroller of the currency, has said he wants to simplify the CRA, giving it a simple benchmark to be used to gauge a financial institution's compliance.

Eurgubian said any effort to add credit unions to the CRA would run counter to the administration's desire to decrease the regulatory burden that financial institutions face, since the CRA would greatly increase the regulatory burden for credit unions.

But the GAO said there is a need to hold financial institutions more accountable in their efforts to reach low- and moderate-income consumers. They cited shortcomings in the examinations that banking agencies conduct to measure CRA compliance.

The GAO reported federal regulators do not conduct an evaluation of an institution's retail banking efforts at every institution visited.

"For example, while large institutions are subject to evaluations of their services, lending and support of community development, smaller institutions are primarily evaluated on their lending," the GAO said.

And the accountability office reported institutions are subject to a lending test, but the test does not include an evaluation of the bank's small-dollar, non-mortgage consumer loans.

The GAO also reported lower income households were more likely to obtain credit from an alternative financial services provider, such as a payday lender, and less likely to have a checking or savings account with a bank or credit union than their higher-income counterparts.

The GAO said some community and consumer groups are pushing for the regulations implementing the CRA to be strengthened.

However, the GAO proposed another option would be to expand the CRA to non-banks, stating that one advocacy group said credit unions were more apt to retreat from modest-income neighborhoods during the Great Recession because they did not have to comply with CRA requirements. The GAO also said one person in a discussion the agency held said it would make sense to impose CRA-like rules if a credit union wants to be designated as a community development financial institution.

And Randal Quarels, the Federal Reserve's vice chairman for supervision, said the emerging fintech industries may require a reevaluation of the CRA.

"The arrival of new financial technologies, along with significant industry consolidation and other structural changes, has changed the way that financial services are delivered to consumers and the ways in which banks lend in communities," he said, according to the text of a speech he recently delivered at the Hope Global Forums annual meeting.

Banking groups have long pushed for credit unions to be included in the CRA.

"Multiple studies have indicated that credit unions are not meeting even the fundamental mandate of their charter to serve people of modest means; their members have higher incomes and education levels than bank customers," the Independent Community Bankers of America contended.

And the American Bankers Association argued that while one of the goals of the Credit Union Act is to make credit available to people of modest means, credit unions are not required to document their services to these people.

Credit unions said research shows they do serve working-class Americans. CUNA said national survey data from the 2016 Federal Reserve study of consumer finances showed 62% of primary credit union customers have incomes between $25,000 and $100,000.

By comparison, CUNA said, 54.2% of primary bank customers fall into that income range.

"The CRA was designed for a different industry," Hunt said.

There is nothing new in the statements being made by the banking industry, Hunt added.

"This is the same noise that we've heard before," she said. "We've only seen the same arguments that we've seen before."