Rep. Maxine Waters, the senior Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee, said she and her colleagues are asking for a quicker pace of work to implement diversity provisions of the Dodd-Frank Act.
"Rep. Maxine Waters said 'some … agencies have made more progress than others' implementing a Dodd-Frank Act provision requiring special offices 'of minority and women inclusion' within several of the federal financial agencies. The provision, known as section 342, mandated that the offices recommend diversity standards, submit annual reports on each agency's diversity-related activities and conduct outreach efforts for the recruitment of minorities and women," writes American Banker's Joe Adler.
Waters and other members of her committee are eager to see results. The heads of each respective Office of Minority and Women Inclusion are in the process of developing a joint draft proposal for "assessing diversity within regulated entities," and Waters understands it could be time-consuming.
"Because of the different organization structures of the agencies, some OMWI's have to go through a more elaborate time-consuming process to vet any draft proposals within their agencies. I understand these different organizational hurdles, and recognize the need to carefully proceed with implementing section 342," Waters said.
"But after more than a year since most of the OMWI's have been in existence, I and other committee and CBC members who fought for section 342 are growing a little bit impatient. If it takes very much longer for the OMWI's to issue a draft proposal on these standards, for example, I and my colleagues may need to prod the agencies a bit to get them to move faster."
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