In Brief: GAO Report Expected to Praise Fair-Lending

The General Accounting Office is expected to release a report within the next two months praising the banking industry's fair-lending compliance efforts.

A GAO spokesman said his agency, the independent investigative arm of Congress, is wrapping up its review and expects to deliver its report by the end of May. The spokesman declined to comment further.

Bobbie Jean Norris, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.'s fair-lending specialist, said in an interview that the report "would likely be pretty favorable." She said regulators had met with accounting office representatives several times to review early drafts of the report, but had not done so in the past three months.

Regulators said the report's conclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Ms. Norris said her agency had uncovered only 25 possible fair-lending violations in more than 9,000 bank examinations from 1992 to 1995.

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