OCC Acts to Improve Transparency and Consistency to Bank Enforcement and Supervisory Standards

Key dates

2026-08-27

OCC revised PPM 5310-3 and PPM 5400-11, issued Bulletin 2026-41, and published the proposed rulemaking notice concerning substantive and technical violations. The proposed rule's 30-day comment period begins only upon Federal Register publication.

Suggested considerations

• Compliance teams may wish to map open and recently closed MRAs and enforcement actions against the revised material-financial-risk threshold and the stated tailoring factors of capital structure, complexity, activities, and asset size.
• Banks should consider documenting objective facts, legal violations, financial-risk consequences, customer impact, duration, frequency, severity, and remediation status supporting the classification and closure of examination findings.
• Large and complex banks may wish to reassess escalation risk because the OCC expressly permits enforcement action for practices that might not produce the same response at a community bank.
• Banks should consider reviewing corrective-action plans to confirm that each action is directly tied to a specific deficiency and is proportionate to the risk, while preserving evidence of substantial compliance with existing orders.
• Compliance teams may wish to distinguish substantive violations from potential technical violations in issue-management inventories, including systemic or repeated conduct, customer restitution, books-and-records impacts, financial-condition effects, and insider misconduct.
• Banks should consider monitoring the Federal Register for publication of the proposed rule and calculating the 30-day comment period from that publication date; affected institutions may wish to submit comments on the proposed substantive-versus-technical framework.
• Examiners may identify lower-level weaknesses as supervisory observations rather than MRAs; banks should consider maintaining internal governance and risk records for such observations without assuming that the OCC may require a board action plan or track remediation in the same manner as an MRA.

What changed

Revised PPM 5310-3, Bank Enforcement Action and Related Matters, replaces the May 25, 2023 version and emphasizes escalation, tailoring, and focused corrective action. The OCC generally expects to provide a bank an opportunity to remediate deficiencies through supervision before taking an enforcement action under section 8 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, although it retains authority to act at any time when legally supportable. Enforcement actions should contain only corrective actions necessary to address specific deficiencies, and the OCC may terminate an action when the bank has achieved substantial compliance with its essential requirements, even if minor isolated requirements remain. Revised PPM 5400-11, Matters Requiring Attention, replaces the February 27, 2026 version and wa

Who is affected

• National banks
• Federal savings associations
• Federal branches and agencies of foreign banks
• Large or complex OCC-supervised banks
• Community banks and other OCC-supervised institutions subject to examinations, MRAs, or enforcement actions

Related regulations

• 12 CFR 4.92
• 12 CFR 30
• 12 USC 1818
• Section 8 of the Federal Deposit Insurance Act