The Office of Inspector General (OIG) at the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) has issued its evaluation report on the reliability of the data contained in its Virtual Supervisory Information on the Net (ViSION) system. The ViSION system contains information relating to the financial conditions, bank examinations, and supervisory matters involving FDIC-regulated financial institutions. It is considered by the FDIC to be a “mission-essential” system that supports its supervision and insurance responsibilities. There are more than 4,100 users of the ViSION system.
The objective of our evaluation was to determine whether key supervisory information in the ViSION system was reliable: accurate, complete, and supported by source documentation. The FDIC guidance states that the ViSION system contains 19 key data elements that must be error free, with a required accuracy rate of 100 percent. Our evaluation focused on 4 of these data elements in the ViSION system: (1) Examination Ratings; (2) Examination Start Date; (3) Examination Completion Date; and (4) Examination Report Mail Date.
We found that two of the four key data elements tested were not reliable. Specifically, we found numerous errors for the Examination Completion Date (14 banks) and the Examination Report Mail Date (12 banks), because of weaknesses in the FDIC’s quality control procedures and practices for these two key data elements. Unreliable Completion Dates may increase the risk of a late examination start and thereby noncompliance with statutory requirements for examination frequency, and similarly, unreliable Mail Dates may increase the risk of incorrect deposit insurance assessments, though we did not detect late examination starts or incorrect assessments in our sample. We did not find errors for the Examination Ratings and Start Date data elements. We also concluded that the risk-based assessment of the ViSION system data was outdated and not properly documented.
The report contains six recommendations for the FDIC to develop and implement standard guidance; conduct training; revise quality assurance procedures; correct errors in ViSION; conduct a risk assessment to identify key supervisory information in the ViSION system; and update the data reliability guidance based upon the results of the risk assessment.