ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity Supports Tiered Regulation to Support Economic Recovery
Washington, D.C. (April 16, 2013)—The Independent Community Bankers of America® (ICBA) today called on members of Congress to advance legislation that would relieve community banks of unnecessary regulatory burdens that impede their ability to provide credit in their communities. Testifying before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Credit, ICBA Chairman Bill Loving said better calibrating community bank regulations through provisions in ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity legislative platform will help these institutions reach their full potential as catalysts for economic growth and job creation.
“ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity is a platform of legislative recommendations that will provide meaningful relief for community banks and allow them to thrive by doing what they do best—serving and growing their communities,” said Loving, who is also president and CEO of Pendleton Community Bank in Franklin, W.Va. “By rebalancing unsustainable regulatory burden, the plan will ensure that scarce capital and labor resources are used productively, not sunk into unnecessary compliance costs, allowing community banks to better focus on lending and investing that will directly improve the quality of life in our communities.”
The Plan for Prosperity is a flexible legislative platform designed to ease excessive, redundant and costly regulations. Among its provisions, the Plan for Prosperity would:
- Exempt community banks from certain mortgage reforms to support the housing recovery
- Reduce annual privacy notice redundancies to cut paperwork
- Ease municipal advisor registration burdens to help serve local governments
- Strengthen the industry’s voice with an assistant Treasury secretary for community banks
- Reform the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to ensure more balanced regulation
- Improve accountability in bank exams with a workable appeals process
- Offer relief from accounting and auditing expenses for publicly traded institutions
- Support mutual banks with new charter and dividend rules
- Require rigorous and quantitative justification of new regulations
- Support additional capital for small bank holding companies
- Cut the red tape in small-business lending
- Facilitate capital formation by reforming Subchapter S corporation regulations and extending the net-operating-loss carry-back
The continually increasing burden of regulation discourages new community bank charters and lead to further industry consolidation, which harms competition, consumers, and exposes taxpayers to the risk of additional costly bailouts. The ICBA Plan for Prosperity outlined today helps provide appropriate tiering of regulation and relief for smaller, low-risk institutions so they can better serve their communities and promote economic growth and a diverse financial system.
For more information, visit www.icba.org. To read ICBA’s Plan for Prosperity click here.
About ICBA
The Independent Community Bankers of America®, the nation’s voice for nearly 7,000 community banks of all sizes and charter types, is dedicated exclusively to representing the interests of the community banking industry and its membership through effective advocacy, best-in-class education and high-quality products and services. For more information, visit www.icba.org.
