Clarifying which documents created for, or received from, the international committee that advocates bank capital standards should be treated as records by the national bank regulator was recommended by the congressional watchdog said Thursday.
In a report of findings, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) told the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) that it should revise its records retention policy or issue supplemental guidance to clarify which documents it received from the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, which sets and recommends regulatory standards for banks to enhance financial stability, should be treated as records.
GAO said it recommended that the national bank regulator revise its records retention policy or issue supplemental guidance to clarify which documents created for or received from the Basel Committee should be treated as records. GAO said the OCC agreed with the recommendation.
“U.S. banking regulators have policies that generally direct their staff to retain documents that they create or receive during their participation on the Committee,” the GAO said in a summary of its report. “But OCC’s policy doesn’t clearly tell staff whether or when to treat such documents as records. We recommended clarifying this policy to help ensure OCC has the documents it needs to support rulemaking and leadership during Committee negotiations.”
GAO said the Basel Committee “expects members” to treat the panel’s work as confidential. The OCC is one of four U.S. members of the committee. The others are the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System (FRB), Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. (FDIC).
The OCC, GAO said, was the only one of the four whose policies not only did not expressly cover the committee’s work, but that “only documents used as background or working files in rulemaking to implement Basel standards are considered records under their policy.”
The congressional watchdog asserted that the committee’s internal regulations state that internal discussions and the analyses on which they are based should be kept confidential. “It also has a process for collecting sensitive bank data (for assessing the effect of standards on select banks), which requires analysts to sign a confidentiality agreement intended to protect the data,” GAO said. “The Committee imposes no penalties for violating these expectations, but could take informal action (e.g., restrict a member’s access to information).”
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