Banking

The Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) advises savings associations to consult it before they consider transferring to an external entity their high-risk assets—such as nonperforming loans—when the bank retains significant credit risk related to those assets and simultaneously provides considerable funding to the receiving entity ( www.ots.treas.gov/docs/25156.pdf ). In order to remove troublesome assets from their balance sheets, the watchdog agency says, some banks have executed such transactions and inappropriately accounted for them as sales.