This transcript of a hearing before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer, and Monetary Affairs presents testimony on the practices of Federal depository regulatory agencies and the Department of Justice in identifying and prosecuting criminal misconduct in the Nation's financial institutions.
Other stated purposes of the hearing are to determine how widespread criminal misconduct is in failed financial institutions, whether the banking agencies adequately< investigate insider abuse, whether the agencies make adequate criminal referrals to the Justice Department, whether the Justice Department vigorously prosecutes bank fraud cases, and whether the banking agencies adequately use their civil enforcement powers. A member of the subcommittee staff presents a statistical analysis of the civil actions taken and the criminal referrals made since 1980 by Federal regulatory agencies involving misconduct and bank fraud by officers, directors, and insiders of banks and thrift institutions. The analysis targeted the actions of the Federal Reserve, the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Representatives of these agencies as well as of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department testify about their investigation and prosecution of insider abuse in financial institutions. They indicate that insider abuse has been widespread among financial institutions that have failed. Some of the problems mentioned in investigating and prosecuting such misconduct are a lack of interagency cooperation, inadequate resources, insufficient agency staff training, and the restrictions imposed by the Right to Financial Privacy Act of 1978. Various legislative recommendations are offered for addressing these and other identified problems. Extensive appendixes present information on the enforcement activities of the aforementioned Federal agencies regarding insider abuse in financial institutions, case studies of bank failures, relevant press articles, and FBI bank crime statistics for calendar year 1982.