NCUA sunnier than FDIC, not as sunny as OCC

<p>WASHINGTON – An analysis of agency annual Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) reports indicates that NCUA does a better job in answering the information requests than the FDIC but still lags behind the Comptroller of the Currency. According to NCUA’s report for 2001, the agency fully or partially answered over 90% of requests for information, primarily exempting itself from answering questions that addressed proprietary credit union information, internal NCUA communications and credit union exam reports. The agency processed 391 requests for information last year, and the median time for responding to the bulk of those requests was 5.5 days. Every year the federal financial regulators publish reports of their FOIA activity, specifically using a similar format to allow for comparison, said Dianne Salva, NCUA FOIA Officer. By comparison NCUA lagged the Comptroller of the Currency’s effort in fiscal year 2000 (the report for Fiscal Year 2001 was not yet available). In that year the federal bank regulator fully or partially answered 94.4% of its Information Act requests. It processed 5,354 requests that year and took a median of two days to process the bulk of them. But the agency sharply improved on the FDIC’s performance last year. According to the bank insurer’s report for fiscal year 2001, the FDIC fully or partially answered only 68.7% of its requests for information under FOIA. FDIC response time was slower too. The FDIC processed 788 requests for information and took a median time of 21 calendar days for each one last fiscal year.</p>