Large credit unions use their unjustified tax advantage to fuel bank-buying sprees that take tax-paying businesses off tax rolls at community expense, and expand into new higher-income markets to drive more deposits, higher profits, and customer growth. With 404 credit unions each holding more than $1 billion in assets and approaching 500 is it fair for these large credit unions to be beneficiaries?
According to the Tax Foundation, one of the nation’s leading independent voices on tax policy, the federal income tax exemption for credit unions is inefficient, narrowly beneficial to one subset of the financial services industry, and an unfair competitive advantage that “…could be reformed, and the resulting revenue used to further improve the corporate tax base or pay for new spending.”
There are moments when it’s easy to explain how large credit unions are abusing their federal tax exemption, which was created by Congress years ago to subsidize the provision of financial services to people of modest means.
Large credit unions remind one of the classic video game Pac-Man, moving quickly and eating up as many banks as possible as their regulator remains as ethereal as the bad ghosts chasing dear old Pac. Unfortunately, the only people with a stack of quarters to keep the game going are American taxpayers as more and more banks leave the federal tax roll when they are subsumed by large, tax-exempt credit unions.
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