In an internal CRA review, we discovered that a mistake was made in reporting our 2003 CRA LR. We had 415 small business loans and 15 small farm loans. However, we incorrectly reported them all as small business loans. (It was our first year as a large bank). What should we do about this now? Should we re-submit? We are now back to being a small bank (OTS), so will this be that big a deal?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this? We are at a loss as to corrective action.

Disclaimer: This is free advice from a chat room. These are just some thoughts to consider.

1. Let senior management make the call. Resubmitting may not be a big deal or it could be a huge project (overtime).

2. If your examiners found out you knew and did nothing what would they do?

3. Fix the problem, even if you are "small" again because if you get "big" again you will have to retrain and relearn. (how fast are you growing??)

4. What's your attorneys think? You may not know all there is to know, refer to #1.

Good Luck & Sorry I will not be able to respond until after March 1, 2005

More free advice... worth what you pay for it. Why not call your OTS Regional Office and ask. I don't know what region you are in, but the Dallas Office is always happy to answer questions. Since you no longer have to report for a couple more years at least, they may just tell you to forget it. But, if all that you have to do is pull 15 Small Farm loans out of your Small Business loan data, and report them correctly, the OTS may say go ahead an resubmit. I would let them tell you what to do.

I'll counter that advice to give you some options If you had remained reportable, I'd say resubmit IF they take data integrity errors over 5% of the entire LR. For you, that looks to be about 3.6% so if the rest of the data is clean, and you were still large, I wouldn't bother resubmitting.

Because you're small again, I frankly wouldn't bother. I'd note in your submission file (a file only viewable by internal folks) that the error happened, how it was corrected, and that you did not refile again because the error ratio was below the 5% tollerance level and because you were back at small bank status.

I don't let senior management make the call. I would advise them of the situation, share my decision, and if they felt something else effected my choice we might discuss how to proceed, but you (and me) are the experts.

There is no need to fuss with the attorneys. CRA is not a regulation that assesses penalties, monatary or civil.

There is however one little thing I would suggest you consider. Did your fix include the call report? If you have reported these incorrectly on the call report you need to immediately fix that issue. There is most likely no need to refile the call reports, but once a problem on the call reports is discovered, failure to correct it can be both costly and if it's really bad, send someone (not you) to the clinker