The regulator of banks at a state-level responded to reports of legal infringements by a credit union to say: “why don’t you change banks?” Of course the important question here is: “why don’t you enforce the law? Are banks above the law?”

I wanted to find out how many reports of unlawful conduct by banks in the state were reported and how many are acted on. So I requested disclosure of reports and remedies for a specific credit union.

They’re response: investigations and actions taken against banks are secret.

WTF? This is a public regulator. How is this even possible? To be clear, we pay taxes to finance this regulator of banks, yet we are blocked from seeing whether they do their job? And we are blocked from seeing complaints submitted by the public, thus blocked from taking self-defense measures to avoid bad actors?

Would it be sensible to have a non-profit host a searchable website that publishes people’s complaints before forwarding them to the secretive regulator?