Our guidance depends on the type of transaction. In general, our recommendation is to retain all corporate governance documents indefinitely, including bank charters, bylaws and their amendments, board minutes and resolutions, etc. Aside from taxation rules, we are not aware of laws or regulations that require banks to retain such documents, but we do recommend doing so as a best practice for all of the banking and corporate entities in an organization.

Our recommendation covers the corporate governance documents of predecessor institutions that your bank has acquired or merged with. However, for purchase and assumption transactions made by your bank or its predecessors, such as for the purchase of loans, deposits and/or branches of another institution (whether directly from another institution or from the FDIC), there should be no need to be concerned with any of the other institution’s corporate documents. Rather, for these transactions, your bank should look to any document retention requirements that are set forth in the provisions of the purchase and assumption agreements, after which your bank would follow its own record retention policies and procedures.