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Career Description

Enforce or ensure compliance with laws and regulations governing financial and securities institutions and financial and real estate transactions. May examine, verify, or authenticate records.

What Job Titles Financial Examiners Might Have

• Credit Union Examiner
• Examining Officer
• Principal Examiner
• Supervisory Examiner

What Financial Examiners Do

• Investigate activities of institutions to enforce laws and regulations and to ensure legality of transactions and operations or financial solvency.
• Prepare reports, exhibits and other supporting schedules that detail an institution's safety and soundness, compliance with laws and regulations, and recommended solutions to questionable financial conditions.
• Recommend actions to ensure compliance with laws and regulations, or to protect solvency of institutions.
• Resolve problems concerning the overall financial integrity of banking institutions including loan investment portfolios, capital, earnings, and specific or large troubled accounts.
• Direct and participate in formal and informal meetings with bank directors, trustees, senior management, counsels, outside accountants and consultants to gather information and discuss findings.
• Review balance sheets, operating income and expense accounts, and loan documentation to confirm institution assets and liabilities.
• Plan, supervise, and review work of assigned subordinates.
• Review audit reports of internal and external auditors to monitor adequacy of scope of reports or to discover specific weaknesses in internal routines.
• Train other examiners in the financial examination process.
• Review and analyze new, proposed, or revised laws, regulations, policies, and procedures to interpret their meaning and determine their impact.
• Examine the minutes of meetings of directors, stockholders and committees to investigate the specific authority extended at various levels of management.
• Confer with officials of real estate, securities, or financial institution industries to exchange views and discuss issues or pending cases.
• Establish guidelines for procedures and policies that comply with new and revised regulations and direct their implementation.
• Evaluate data processing applications for institutions under examination to develop recommendations for coordinating existing systems with examination procedures.
• Verify and inspect cash reserves, assigned collateral, and bank-owned securities to check internal control procedures.
• Provide regulatory compliance training to employees.
• Review applications for mergers, acquisitions, establishment of new institutions, acceptance in Federal Reserve System, or registration of securities sales to determine their conformance to regulations, and recommend acceptance or rejection.

What Financial Examiners Should Be Good At

• Written Comprehension - The ability to read and understand information and ideas presented in writing.
• Oral Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in speaking so others will understand.
• Problem Sensitivity - The ability to tell when something is wrong or is likely to go wrong. It does not involve solving the problem, only recognizing there is a problem.
• Deductive Reasoning - The ability to apply general rules to specific problems to produce answers that make sense.
• Near Vision - The ability to see details at close range (within a few feet of the observer).
• Oral Comprehension - The ability to listen to and understand information and ideas presented through spoken words and sentences.
• Written Expression - The ability to communicate information and ideas in writing so others will understand.
• Inductive Reasoning - The ability to combine pieces of information to form general rules or conclusions (includes finding a relationship among seemingly unrelated events).
• Category Flexibility - The ability to generate or use different sets of rules for combining or grouping things in different ways.
• Speech Recognition - The ability to identify and understand the speech of another person.
• Speech Clarity - The ability to speak clearly so others can understand you.
• Information Ordering - The ability to arrange things or actions in a certain order or pattern according to a specific rule or set of rules (e.g., patterns of numbers, letters, words, pictures, mathematical operations).
• Mathematical Reasoning - The ability to choose the right mathematical methods or formulas to solve a problem.

What Financial Examiners Should Be Interested In

• Enterprising - Enterprising occupations frequently involve starting up and carrying out projects. These occupations can involve leading people and making many decisions. Sometimes they require risk taking and often deal with business.
• Conventional - Conventional occupations frequently involve following set procedures and routines. These occupations can include working with data and details more than with ideas. Usually there is a clear line of authority to follow.

What Financial Examiners Need to Learn

• Economics and Accounting - Knowledge of economic and accounting principles and practices, the financial markets, banking and the analysis and reporting of financial data.
• English Language - Knowledge of the structure and content of the English language including the meaning and spelling of words, rules of composition, and grammar.
• Law and Government - Knowledge of laws, legal codes, court procedures, precedents, government regulations, executive orders, agency rules, and the democratic political process.
• Mathematics - Knowledge of arithmetic, algebra, geometry, calculus, statistics, and their applications.
• Administration and Management - Knowledge of business and management principles involved in strategic planning, resource allocation, human resources modeling, leadership technique, production methods, and coordination of people and resources.