Under the amendments to the Official Staff Commentary to Regulation DD, which go into effect on July 1, 2006, you may not group together fees for paying overdrafts and fees for returning checks or other unpaid items on the periodic statement. This new interpretation applies irrespective of whether you advertise your overdraft protection program. In addition, if you do advertise your overdraft protection program, you are required to separately disclose the total overdraft fees and the total fees for returned items for both the current statement period and the year-to-date.
I read somewhere that we now must separately disclose fees for paying overdrafts and fees for returning items on our periodic statements, and that we must have separate names for each fee. We label our fees as “overdraft paid/return check fee” on our periodic statements. We do not charge a different fee for each event. Do I now need to break this fee out into two line items and assess them separately?
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