NCUA on Interra CU Move on Hicksville Bank Redacts in New FOIA Denial Revealing More Contempt

NCUA on Interra CU Move on Hicksville Bank Redacts in New FOIA Denial Revealing More Contempt by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack FEDERAL COURT, Sept 15 – Interra Credit Union proposes to expand in Ohio by buying up The Hickville Bank. Many are opposing it; some have contacted Fair Finance Watch and Inner City Press. On June 6 Inner City Press submitted a FOIA request to NCUA, the National Credit Union Administration, for the application and related documents. On June 9, NCUA wrote back that " Before your request can be considered "received" certain information must be included in the request. Your request is missing the following required information:  A reasonable description of the records you seek."  Really?    Then the threat, by seemingly lawless NCUA: "provide the required information by June 16. If no response is received by this date, NCUA will assume you no longer seek information and will take no further action on the request."  But the request named a specific credit union — Interra Credit Union of Goshen, Indiana. It identified a specific pending transaction — the acquisition of The Hickville Bank. It provided a specific time frame — records since January 1, 2020. It listed specific categories — merger application records, HMDA fair lending review, consumer complaints, and inter-agency communications. NCUA says that is not specific enough. Courts have held for decades that a FOIA request is reasonably described if it enables a professional agency employee to locate the records with reasonable effort. Yeager v. DEA, 678 F.2d 315, 326 (D.C. Cir. 1982). FFW responded, demanding that NCUA reverse its determination immediately and produce Interra-related records. It was in August when NCUA partially granted Inner City Press's FOIA request for consumer complaints and merger-related records — and in the same production, disclosed its own internal plans for a rule change that would make exactly the kind of transaction under scrutiny in one of Fair Finance Watch's active comments easier to complete with less public notice.  The complaint data itself arrived heavily stripped. Two spreadsheets — one covering all credit union complaints from January 2025 through June 2026, another specifically on Interra Credit Union — redact the Subject and Description field of every single entry, leaving only category codes: "Credit Denial," "Billing Dispute," "Auto Repossession," "Unauthorized Transactions." What people actually told NCUA happened to them is gone from thousands of complaints, redacted under a personal-privacy exemption that, on its face, doesn't obviously require deleting a complaint's substance once its general category is already disclosed elsewhere in the same row. Inner City Press appealed.  On September 10 NCUA denied Inner City Press's appeal. NCUA's General Counsel Frank Kressman claimed the redactions are justified under Exemption 6, walking through the standard four-part privacy analysis and concluding that "personally identifiable information" in the complaint records carries a significant privacy interest outweighing any FOIA public interest in disclosure.  The case law cited in support, though, addresses a narrower category of information than what was actually redacted. NCUA cites Wadhwa v. VA for protecting "names, phone numbers, and email addresses," International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers v. HUD for protecting Social Security numbers, and Pubien v. EOUSA for protecting names generally — all cases about discrete personal identifiers. Inner City Press's appeal did not ask for names, phone numbers, or Social Security numbers; it asked why the entire narrative Subject and Description of each complaint was stripped, when the spreadsheets' own "Problem" category field — "Credit Denial," "Auto Repossession," "Unauthorized Transactions" — already discloses the general nature of each complaint without identifying anyone. NCUA's denial does not explain why a complaint's substantive narrative, stripped of any name or contact information, would itself constitute the kind of identifying detail Exemption 6 is built to protect.  This is the same production that began, in June, with NCUA claiming Inner City Press's request — which named a specific credit union, a specific pending acquisition, a specific date range, and specific record categories — failed to "reasonably describe" the records sought, before quietly processing it anyway once challenged. Nine months and multiple exchanges later, what NCUA has actually disclosed about what credit union members told the agency happened to them remains, in every entry produced, a category code and nothing more. NCUA is lawless and should be subject to greater oversight. On September 15, another denial - but one that is revealing: Records produced by the National Credit Union Administration in response to a FOIA request reveal a second deregulatory rule in development, beyond the previously reported bank-conversion rule easing disclosure requirements for credit unions converting to banks. This one, 12 CFR Part 708b, addresses mergers between credit unions themselves — and would eliminate a requirement, in place since 2018, that NCUA and merging credit unions publicly post member comments on proposed mergers on an accessible website.  NCUA's own internal justification, laid out in a November 2025 email from Associate General Counsel Ian Marenna to OMB seeking a significance determination on the rule, rests on low engagement: "since adoption of this rule in October 2018, comment volume has been low. In 2024, for example, the NCUA received member feedback on only 24 percent of mergers. The paucity of comments strongly suggests affected parties have put little value on agency efforts."  That reasoning inverts the usual logic of transparency requirements. A comment-posting mechanism that only 24 percent of mergers generated feedback on could reflect low awareness of the mechanism's existence, difficulty finding it, or simple friction in participating — not necessarily that credit union members "put little value" on having a say in whether their institution merges into another. Using low engagement with a disclosure requirement to justify eliminating the requirement, rather than improving how it's publicized, is the same move now showing up across multiple financial regulators' deregulatory proposals this year, at NCUA, OCC, and FDIC alike. Watch this site FFW, after the Federal Reserve refused to act to ensure public access to Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data,  has commented to the FDIC and NCUA on the 2024 HMDA data: This is a timely first comment opposing and requesting an extension of the FDIC's public comment period on the proposal by The Hickville Bank to be acquired by Interra Credit Union. The FDIC's website lists an application by Hickville Bank to acquire.. Hickville Bank. If this is the Interra proposal, the notice is troublingly misleading and should be republished and the comment period started again. After Inner City Press raised that, the FDIC fixed the notice to list Interra - and now the comment period runs through July 2. It should be longer - watch this site. Fair Finance Watch, which has commented to the FDIC that its lawless decision to eliminate public notice of branch applications violates the CRA, noting the FDIC's rationale that it receives few public comments, hereby timely informs the FDIC of this:   Interra in Indiana in 2024 made 1003 mortgage loans to whites, with 220 denial to whites. By contrast it made only ONE loan to an African American, while denying five African Americans. This by itself is disqualifying.   Of course, there are many other grounds and sources of opposition... We will be submitting more comments before the stated June 27 expiration of the comment period. As stated above, this must be extended. FFW notes in the FDIC's pending proposal RIN 3064-AG10: "the FDIC has received a limited number of public comments in response to subpart C applications.... Therefore, the FDIC is proposing to eliminate the public notice and related public comment period from subpart C and to make conforming changes to subpart A of 12 CFR part 303 of the FDIC Rules."   See, e.g., American Banker, Sept 10, 2025, "The FDIC is taking the 'community' out of CRA enforcement," by Matthew R. Lee, https://www.americanbanker.com/opinion/the-fdic-is-undercutting-a-key-element-of-the-cra     The Community Reinvestment Act specifies that "the appropriate Federal financial supervisory agency shall (1) assess the institution's record of meeting the credit needs of its entire community, including low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, consistent with the safe and sound operation of such institution; and (2) take such record into account in its evaluation of an application for a deposit facility by such institution."     That is, the only enforcement mechanism of CRA is its consideration on applications for deposit facilities: branches, and proposed mergers like this one.    But now the FDIC has blithely eliminated public notice and public comment on banks' proposals to expand.  The above-quoted reasoning is that few comments are filed. So, that is now changing. This comment period should be extended, evidentiary hearings should be held; and on the current record, the application should not be approved. Your support means a lot. As little as $5 a month helps keep us going and grants you access to exclusive bonus material on our Patreon page. Click here to become a patron. Feedback: Editorial [at] innercitypress.com SDNY Press Room 500 Pearl Street, NY NY 10007 USA Mail: Box 130222, Chinatown Station, NY NY 10013 Reporter's mobile (and weekends): 718-716-3540 Other, earlier Inner City Press are listed here, and some are available in the ProQuest service, and now on Lexis-Nexis.  Copyright 2006-2025 Inner City Press, Inc. To request reprint or other permission, e-contact Editorial [at] innercitypress.com