The NCUA has amended its original fixed asset rule and will re-propose the rule at its Thursday board meeting.
NCUA Board Chairman Debbie Matz said the new proposal contains a series of changes based on comments the agency received.
"The regulatory relief we are planning for our new rule on fixed assets goes significantly beyond the original proposed rule," Matz said on Tuesday. "Thus, we plan to allow stakeholders an additional 30 days to comment on our new regulatory relief initiative."
The original proposed rule, approved at the agency's July 31 board meeting, required credit unions to put together a fixed-asset management plan instead of going through the existing waiver process.
Matz has said the proposed rule would streamline the process for federal credit unions to occupy land or buildings.
"When you want to update your facilities, upgrade technology, or make other purchases that have no impact on safety and soundness, NCUA should not micromanage your individual business decisions," Matz said in July of last year.
In July 2014, NCUA Board Member Rick Metsger said the plan to eliminate the 5% cap on fixed assets would provide regulatory relief for federal credit unions.
"We thought rather than you [credit unions] coming to us and us going back and forth spending a lot of time approving something, perhaps it's better to allow credit unions to develop their own fixed-asset policies and manage their own assets as they see best," Metsger said.
According to the text of the original proposed rule, "an FCU's (fixed assets management) program is subject to supervisory scrutiny and must provide for close, ongoing oversight of fixed-asset levels and their effect on financial performance."
The board approved a technical correction to the fixed asset rule at Metsger's first board meeting in September 2013.
Following that meeting, Metsger asked NCUA staff to review any issues with fixed assets in terms of the effect on delinquency, return on assets and risk to the credit unions that received waivers versus those that did not.
"We found out that over the five-year window that we looked at [through December 2013], the changes in net worth ratio, ROAA and delinquency ratio were comparable between federal credit unions with high and low fixed-asset ratios." Metsger said. "In other words, there was not really any difference."
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