The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) released a Policy Statement on Tax-Related Products and a Consumer Advisory on February 18, one month into the current tax season. The OCC is the U.S. Treasury Department agency that regulates national banks. Several national banks offer tax refund anticipation loans or RALs through partnerships with tax preparation services.

After Darren Robinson lost his job at a factory, he and his girlfriend Julie Fitzpatrick accrued almost $10,000 in credit card debt paying for living expenses and medical bills. Fitzpatrick found a company online that promised to make them debt free. The couple told the Chicago Tribune that they paid almost $1,500 in fees to the debt settlement company. After a few months, only $2,000 of the debt was settled, and their debts ballooned to $12,000 as collection calls and fees increased.

Momentum continues to build in Washington around expanding small business access to sustainable credit, despite the postponement of the hearing to consider the state of small business lending in local markets in the House Small Business and Financial Services Committees. Keeping credit flowing to small businesses is critical, especially in times of recession and high unemployment. Small businesses are engines for job creation, creating roughly 80 percent of new jobs and employing over half of private sector employees. Ensuring that small businesses are equipped to grow through productive, sustainable credit and create new jobs will be a vital component of economic recovery.

A coalition of community reinvestment and consumer organizations asked the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), charged with overseeing consumer protections for national banks, to immediately implement its longstanding, but unenforced, disclosure requirements, advertising standards, and capital requirements for refund anticipation loans.  The consumer organizations sent a joint letter on February 4, 2010.

The scramble to secure tax refund loan partnerships before the opening day of the 2010 tax season is the direct result of a regulatory crackdown that many consumer advocates believe was long overdue. With one major lender undercapitalized and another under increased scrutiny, it is clear regulators are beginning to take notice of the issue. However, both of these actions were taken to protect the safety and soundness of the banks themselves, not to protect the Illinois consumers who paid $114 million dollars in 2006 just to receive their tax refund loan a few days earlier than if they had waited for the IRS refund.