ABA Opposes Credit Union Efforts to Loosen Membership Rules

ABA President and CEO Frank Keating yesterday expressed the association’s strong opposition to efforts by the Credit Union National Association to ease further the already-loose field of membership requirements that ensure credit unions remain dedicated to serving people with meaningful common bonds.

“For years, tax-dodging credit unions have been granted extensive authority by their regulator, leveraging their taxpayer subsidy to grow aggressively while resorting to gimmicks to evade existing membership restrictions,” Keating said. “These new actions, if taken, would be yet another abuse of both the letter and spirit of the law.”

CUNA has urged the National Credit Union Administration to take what it called “an innovative approach to the agency’s current statutory authority,” including by increasing the population cap on local community size for community charters 400 percent to 10 million and by allowing a CU to consider any area a community if it is a single congressional district. “As the credit union industry seeks to expand, it does so at the expense of all taxpayers,” Keating said. “Congress should be very concerned, and NCUA should quickly and strongly reject this attempted power grab.”