Treasury Department Issues Recommendations on Reforming the Community Reinvestment Act
On April 3, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a report detailing a number of recommendations for reforming and modernizing the Community Reinvestment Act framework. The report includes a number of recommendations for (i) changing the way CRA geographic assessment areas are defined to reflect the changing nature of banking arising from changing technology, customer behavior, and other factors; (ii) improving the CRA performance evaluation criteria to increase the transparency and effectiveness of CRA rating determinations; (iii) harmonizing CRA-related oversight and improving the CRA examination process; and (iv) improving how banks’ CRA performance is incentivized to improve the benefit to communities.