Pub. 13 2018-2019 Issue 4

WWW.NEBANKERS.ORG 22 Shedding Light on the Farm Credit System, America’s Least Known GSE © 2018 Bert Ely BERT ELY’S FARM CREDIT WATCH® THE HEIGHT OF FCA HYPOCRISY I RECENTLY DISCOVERED ON THE WEBSITE OF THE FARM CREDIT Administration (FCA), the Farm Credit System’s (FCS) regulator, an FCA policy statement that represents the height of hypocrisy — the FCA wants FCS institutions to “keep abreast of enforcement actions taken by other regula- tors” against individuals who have been disciplined by another financial regulator yet the FCA refuses to publish enforcement orders it has issued against current or former FCS employees. The FCA conveniently provides links to the relevant webpages of five other financial regulators — the Fed, FDIC, NCUA, OCC and the SEC — but not to its own enforcement actions. Read the policy statement at https://bit.ly/2qynrV0. The FCA goes on to say that “it is important for [FCS] institutions to be aware of the individuals and institutions against which [enforcement] actions have been taken . . . by other regulators” because federal law prohibits anyone who has been subject to such an order “from participating in the conduct of the affairs of an FCS institution without prior approval by FCA and the agency that issued the order.” Amazingly, the FCA is not willing to provide this same reciprocal courtesy to the other financial regulators or to the institutions they regulate. The unwillingness of the FCA to publish enforcement orders against individual miscreants complements another FCA policy I previously have criticized — its flat-out refusal to publish enforcement orders issued against FCS institutions. All the banking regulators, of course, readily publish the enforcement orders they have issued as well as the size of penalties they have levied. However, according to FCA Policy Statement #34, the FCA will not disclose an enforcement action if the FCA’s general counsel “determines that a disclosure adversely affects a civil or criminal investigation.” The banking regulators do not seem