NCUA Told to Speed Year-2000-Fix Preparations

The National Credit Union Administration is under more pressure to step up preparations for the year-2000 computer glitch.

The General Accounting Office on Wednesday urged the NCUA to accelerate its efforts to assess the credit union industry's readiness and required the agency to report its progress to Congress in 60 days.

"While NCUA has made some progress in addressing year-2000 compliance issues, more needs to be done to ensure that credit unions adequately mitigate risks," according to the GAO report, which was requested by Sen. Robert Bennett, chairman of Senate Banking's financial services and technology subcommittee.

"I hope these recommendations will be taken seriously and the NCUA will expedite the process to protect national banking interests at the turn of the century," said the Utah Republican.

Financial institutions face technology breakdowns because many computer systems register years by their last two digits. As a result, experts fear data systems will confuse the dates 1900 and 2000 and go haywire.

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