The Independent Community Bankers of America (ICBA) has delivered to federal banking regulators a petition with nearly 15,000 signatures, representing nearly 40 percent of the nation’s community banks, calling for relief from increasingly onerous quarterly reporting requirements. Part of ICBA’s war on community bank regulatory burden, the petition highlights the increasing length and complexity of the quarterly call report and advocates streamlined reporting rules to help community banks devote more of their resources to their customers and communities.
“The quarterly call report is among the many excessively burdensome regulations overwhelming community banks and limiting their ability to support local economic growth,” ICBA President and CEO Camden R. Fine said. “Nearly 15,000 community bankers and industry allies have spoken out in support of reforms to rein in the paperwork burdens weighing on our Main Street economies. We strongly encourage the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council member agencies we are meeting with today to heed the call from community banks nationwide.”
ICBA’s petition cites data from the recently released 2014 ICBA Community Bank Call Report Burden Survey, which found that the annual cost of preparing the call report has increased for 86 percent of respondents over the past 10 years and that community banks are spending hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars each year to comply. The call report has grown over the years to 80 pages of forms, more than 670 pages of instructions and another 57 pages recently proposed to implement Basel III capital standards.
The petition also reiterates ICBA’s call for revised rules that would allow highly rated, well-capitalized community banks to file a short-form call report for the first and third quarters of each year. This streamlined report would provide sufficient information for regulators while being significantly less burdensome to prepare. According to ICBA’s call report survey, 98 percent of respondents said the short-form call report would reduce their regulatory burden, and 72 percent said the reduction would be “substantial.”
