Do you have enough to do to fill your day, EVERY day?
After a recent audit, I'm finding I have a little extra time. I am not used to it. What do you do, to fill the time? I don't want to volunteer for more things because on most days, I have no free time at all, and have to leave several things until tomorrow or next week or next month. All the sudden, I don't know why, but that's not the case now.

Are you bragging?

Where are you.....come help me. Wrapping up loan and board monthly reports, OCC data must be out of here Monday a.m., external accounts arrive here Tuesday a.m. and just received their "wish list", silly me took a week of vacation end of year and still have 57 loans to verify data input on that happend that week.

Enjoy the slow time...it never lasts.

I usually don't have time on my hands; partly because I'm always looking for something else to tackle. If I'm not planning on what we need to do to address the next regulatory change (e.g., MDIA disclosures on 1/30/2011), I'm performing or planning more compliance/bsa monitoring, reviewing policies to determine if they need updating or if new policies/procedures need to be developed, giving/planning training to someone on something. I'm always leary if I have some extra time, 'cause then I wonder what I'm missing.

View BOL, there is always a new/change in regulations. Register and post.

Extra time? Can you give me a definition please. I'm unfamiliar with this concept.

Count yourself lucky and use the time to educate yourself about changes in banking regulations. Or do some reading on a topic you'd like to lead a project on in your bank. Good luck.

If, on the rare occasion, I have a few minutes I look at training--Have we covered all the required ones, are there changes to the regs we need to talk about, etc. I will make up a "reminder handout" to staff.

When I have down time I get the past monthly listings of credit reports pulled. I go through each credit report pulled looking for a new loan or a denial for it. If I can't find one I go to the person who pulled it. I found that we were pulling some credit reports for non-bank activity. I also look for Red Flags that are not being reported since I have all the info in front of me. I would like to do this all the time, but it is very time consuming, so it only gets done a few times a year.

When I have down time I read. There are tons of banker/compliance magazines and websites (such as this one) with an endless amount of materials. This helps me keep my eye on regulatory hot topics or little things I may have missed. And I hope what I provide on bankers threads such as these helps others.

I also have been known to take on cleaning/purging projects. This applies to things like file cabinets and even electronic files. After a few years I have found that some things just need to be reorganized.

Today is National Clean Off Your Desk Day.

Another one: Create or update a file to track accumulation of CPE or other credits for your certifications (CRCM, CCBCO, whatever).

Create a Record Retention Schedule (procedure) and IMPLEMENT it. Having one is great but it does you no good if it is not put into place. Nearly everybody else at your institution is going to be afraid to do this. It's your job in compliance to have the "gall" to do this: find those 5-year-old BSA records and pulp them.

25 months: denials and withdrawn loan applications
2 yrs: Advertisements
2 yrs: Reg CC holds
5 yrs: monetary instrument records
5 yrs: CTRs
5 yrs: CTR exemption initial designations, reviews, old renewals
5 yrs: SARs
5 yrs: reviews of activity which did not result in SARs

P.S. January of each year is a great time to purge BSA records, as it's pretty simple to say "if it's BSA and it's older than 1/1/2006, I don't need or want it anymore."

Do you have a monitoring program?

...eh...A do what now?

What department are you in? Are you Security? Compliance? etc. Many departments have (or should have) a program to monitor the bank's activities to ensure the policies/requirements of their area are carried out correctly.

compliance

You are in compliance and do not know what a monitoring program is? I would say you guys have ALOT of work to do. Maybe you are not busy because you don't realize what you should be doing.

That's quite possible.

I vote for the jump on websites and educate myself. I do not like being blindsided by changes and look for things coming up and ways to keep up with regulatory changes in the works. Not much downtime here either.