Washington, D.C. – Today, U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) released the following statement after passing the bipartisan Recovering Executive Compensation Obtained from Unaccountable Practices (RECOUP) Act through the Senate Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee. For months, Cortez Masto has worked across the aisle on bipartisan legislation to hold senior executives of failed banks accountable, and this new bill includes the federal authority she fought for to claw back executive compensation, penalize them for their misconduct and direct banks to strengthen corporate governance standards.
Cortez Masto recently pressed executives from Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank executives at a Senate Banking hearing on how their mismanagement led to the banks’ failures, and her leadership was instrumental in passing this bill that will now go to the full Senate for full consideration.
“Bank executives shouldn’t be rewarded with millions of dollars in bonuses for putting Nevadans’ financial stability at risk,” said Senator Cortez Masto. “That’s why I worked across the aisle to hold accountable those who act recklessly with taxpayers’ money. I’ll keep working to pass this legislation in the full Senate and send it to the President’s desk to become law.”
Specifically, the bipartisan RECOUP Act will:
- Strengthen regulators’ ability to bring actions against executives who fail to appropriately oversee and manage their bank.
- Require banks to adopt corporate governance and accountability standards that promote responsible management.
- Provide the FDIC with expanded authority to claw back compensation of failed bank senior executives.
- Increase and strengthen certain penalties against reckless executives.
The full bill text is available HERE.
As the former top law enforcement official in Nevada, Senator Cortez Masto has been a leading voice in the fight to protect consumers from fraud throughout her career. She sounded the alarm on increasing check fraud scams, which cost consumers more than $800 million last year. She also introduced legislation to protect American consumers who sue corporations for fraud and to protect and support whistleblowers reporting wrongdoing to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her bipartisan legislation to deter disruptive and potentially harmful phone calls and texts was signed into law in 2020.
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