Summary

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), the Federal Home Loan Bank System (FHLBS), the Federal Reserve System (FRS), the National Credit Union Administration (NCUA), and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) accept, investigate, and resolve consumers' complaints against the banks and saving institutions they regulate. In response to a congressional request, GAO reviewed these agencies' handling of consumer complaints against banks and other regulated financial institutions, including how complaint information is used for supervisory and policymaking purposes.

GAO found that agency complaint systems often help consumers solve significant problems about financial matters. Most favorable resolutions involved situations in which financial institutions had made errors or had violated laws or regulations. However, GAO analyzed 119 serious complaints that uncovered violations of laws or regulations and found that information from these complaints was often not used during subsequent compliance examinations. A review of these examinations showed that only one-third of the time was an examiner even aware that any of the 119 complaints had been filed against an institution since the last examination. In its investigation of how well agencies handled consumers' complaints about credit discrimination, GAO discovered that federal agencies did give some discrimination complaints the special handling suggested by agency procedures. However, this investigation did not allow GAO to conclude that special handling should have been used more often because the agencies did not require complaint handlers to document reasons for the type of discrimination investigations they performed. GAO also studied complaints that dealt with the treatment of inactive and dormant accounts to determine how these complaints were used by agencies in setting policy for banking and savings industries. GAO found that the information contained in complaint files was not organized in a way that would be most useful to policy makers concerned with unfair or deceptive practices.