Matters Requiring Attention for Violations of Laws and Regulations: Notice of Proposed Rulemaking

Key dates

2026-08-27

The OCC issued Bulletin 2026-42 announcing the notice of proposed rulemaking.

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to inventory open and recently closed MRAs arising from alleged legal or regulatory violations and assess whether each matter would satisfy one or more of the proposed substantive-violation criteria.
• Firms should consider strengthening documentation linking examination findings to duration, frequency, systemic characteristics, financial-condition effects, books-and-records impacts, customer harm, restitution, or insider misconduct.
• Banks may wish to separate remediation plans for legal or regulatory violations from broader supervisory enhancements, because the proposal would limit examiner authority over technical violations to directing correction of the violation itself.
• Compliance and examination-management teams should consider preparing comments or internal positions on the undefined terms more than minimal, systemic, pattern, and meaningfully impact, including how those terms should be applied to isolated but high-severity events.
• Management may wish to review escalation thresholds so that technical-violation treatment does not result in under-escalation of recurring findings that could become systemic or satisfy the proposed substantive criteria.
• Banks should monitor the Federal Register publication of the notice of proposed rulemaking and calculate the 30-day comment period from that publication date rather than from the OCC bulletin date.
• Legal and regulatory-change teams may wish to assess this proposal alongside the OCC-FDIC final rule and related supervisory reforms concerning unsafe or unsound practices, MRAs, and material financial risk, while treating the proposal as nonfinal until adopted.

What changed

The proposed rule would provide that the OCC may issue an MRA for a violation of a banking or banking-related law or regulation only when the violation is substantive. A violation would be substantive when its nature, duration, frequency, or severity could meaningfully impact the bank or its customers, and at least one of five criteria would need to be met: the violation is systemic or constitutes a pattern; it has had or could reasonably be expected to have a direct, clear, predictable, and more than minimal impact on the bank's financial condition; it has had or could reasonably be expected to have a more than minimal impact on the accuracy of books and records; it requires more than minimal restitution or could reasonably be expected to have a more than minimal adverse customer impact;

Who is affected

• OCC-supervised national banks
• OCC-supervised federal savings associations
• Federal branches and agencies of foreign banks
• Boards of directors, senior management, compliance functions, internal audit, and legal teams at OCC-supervised banks

Related regulations

• 12 CFR 4.92
• Section 8 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act
• 12 CFR 30
• 12 CFR 170