The new RBC/CCULR net worth rule is the most comprehensive, intrusive and costly regulation ever passed by NCUA.
The agency’s staff’s initial estimate of the funds now restricted from increasing member value is over $24 billion. From their December 2021 board presentation:
Under the CCULR, if all 473 credit unions opted into the CCULR and held the minimum nine percent net worth ratio required to be well capitalized, the total minimum net worth required is estimated at $111.8 billion, an increased capital requirement of $24.3 billion over the minimum required under the 2015 Final Rule.
This is a minimum 30% increase of capital, restricting its use for members, and imposed just nine days after the rule’s printing in the Federal register.
RBC/CCULR is both procedurally and substantively deeply flawed. Instead of implementing the legislative intent that PCA be applied to a limited number of “complex” credit unions, the regulation passed covers 85% of all credit union assets.
But what can be done especially as the NCUA board composed of different philosophies approved the rule 3-0?
A Future Opening
The recent Supreme Court 6-3 ruling in the West Virginia v. EPA case suggests there is another opportunity to withdraw the rule or to challenge its validity.
The EPA case is about much more than regulating pollution. The 89 page opinion is here.
As summarized in a New York times article:
It . . . signals that the court’s newly expanded conservative majority is deeply skeptical of the power of administrative agencies to address major issues facing the nation and the planet.
Chief Justice Roberts, employing the phrase for the first time in a majority opinion, said it applied in cases of unusual significance and was meant to address “a particular and recurring problem: agencies asserting highly consequential power beyond what Congress could reasonably be understood to have granted.”
Another account of the decision in The Hill explains the broader significance of the Court’s reasoning:
In reaching its conclusion, the court relied on the controversial “major questions doctrine.” The major questions doctrine is a relatively new interpretative maxim that directs courts to presume that Congress does not intend to vest agencies with policymaking authority over questions of great economic and political significance.
Only Congress’s “clear statement” that it did intend to confer the claimed authority can overcome this presumption. When a court employs this maxim, it reads statutes narrowly, stripping the agency of the power to address the major question that the statute, on its face, gives the agency the authority to address.
Unsurprisingly, the main focus of the media, scholars and the public is on the consequences of the court’s move for the size and contours of the federal administrative state. . .
The impact of the court’s ruling on federal agency authority and power cannot be overstated.
A lawyer friend when asked, opined: “what I’ve read about it suggests the Court is going to take a very restrictive view when assessing agency claims of regulatory authority (effectively dispensing with Chevron deference). When the authority to regulate is clear, I have no idea how much discretion the agencies will be afforded when exercising that authority. I’m not sure what category the RBC rules fall into.”
The RBC/CCULR rule’s flaws include the following;
- The agency provided no “substantial objective evidence” that the system’s capital levels were inadequate under the existing RBNW rule. Staff admitted that only one troubled credit union in the past ten years would have been subject to RBC’s higher net worth ratio.
- The agency wrongly applied the “comparable” standard to implement a clone of bank regulations. This approach clearly contradicted the statutory intent that RBNW cover only an identified small number of “complex” credit unions that presented unusual risks. As staff confirmed in its board action memo: A special note that most, if not all, of the components of the CCULR are similar to the federal banking agencies’ CBLR.
- There was no statutory authority for a CCULR option which Congress, in legislation, authorized only for banking regulators.
- Nine days for implantation violates the “reasonable period of time” statutory requirement for a change in PCA capital levels.
- The rule imposes significant financial harm to members by reducing the value they receive, beginning with the $24 billion staff estimate. That is just the initial number. It will grow every year.
- The compliance burden is unreasonable. It mandates a one-size-fits-all mathematical capital formula for every credit union independent of hundreds of individual risk circumstances.
A Way Out of the RBC/CCULR Morass
Credit unions can sue the agency for the substantive violations noted. But that takes years and the harm done members will just continue in the meantime.
The most feasible course of action will be for a more informed NCUA board, responsive to the needs of credit union members, to use this Supreme Court precedent to withdraw the rule entirely.
That will require leadership, courage and insight from current or future board members. The first test is to ask the sitting members their views on this deregulation opportunity.
What would Hood, Harper and Hauptmann say in response to this Supreme Court interpretation?