Community banks to regulators: Carve us out of new rules

Community bankers are asking for a reprieve from an onslaught of new regulations that they say disproportionally burden their institutions.

Since 2007, some 900 proposed and finalized rules affecting the banking industry have landed in the Federal Register, according to figures cited by the Independent Community Bankers Association (ICBA.) The rules, however, rarely distinguish between the banking giants blamed for the financial crisis of the late 2000s and small community banks that did nothing wrong, the association said in a statement issued Monday.

“Community banks have little in common with Wall Street firms, megabanks or shadow banking institutions and did not cause the financial crisis or perpetrate abusive consumer practices,” ICBA President and chief executive Camden R. Fine said.

An assortment of the most burdensome regulations amount to as much as 14 percent of community banks’ operating costs. And the new rules are continuing to mount — less than half of more than 230 rules required by the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reform law are now on the books, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office.

Fine argued that policymakers should “carve out” community banks from new regulations and use a tiered approach to rule-making that protects community institutions from onerous requirements meant to hold Wall Street accountable.

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