ALEXANDRIA, Va.-NCUA Chairman Dennis Dollar has appointed an internal working group to evaluate the five recommendations from the General Accounting Office study of credit unions and their regulator. "This group has been tasked to give careful evaluation and review of each of the GAO's five recommendations to the agency," Dollar said. "I expect this review to be extremely thorough and will likely take a number of months as each recommendation must be considered in-depth and all possible options considered. The working group will evaluate both the potential benefit and any downside to any approach that might be appropriate for responding to these recommendations." GAO's five recommendations included: *exploring developing a risk-based funding system; *improving the overhead transfer rate setting process; *refining the process for estimating future insurance losses; *creating a system of tangible indicators to determine service to the underserved; and *subjecting credit unions to internal control reporting and attestation requirements. The working group will be chaired by Executive Director Len Skiles and consist of General Counsel Bob Fenner, Director of Examination and Insurance Dave Marquis, Chief Information Officer Doug Verner, Region I Director Mark Treichel, Region V Director Melinda Love, and Chief Financial Officer Dennis Winans. Dollar added that he was generally pleased with the findings of the report that the credit union community is running strong and NCUA's supervision is effective. "Although there are several of the GAO recommendations in which we see potential value and others in which we envision considerably more regulatory burden than benefit, NCUA is always open to consider ways to improve upon the effectiveness of our regulatory, insurance, and supervisory functions," Dollar concluded. [email protected]