About & Why This Exists

Who's writing this, why it's public, and what that means for how much you should trust it.

I’m a newly appointed member of my credit union’s supervisory committee. I’m not an accountant, I’ve never worked in banking or examinations, and until recently I couldn’t have told you what a supervisory committee actually does. I said yes anyway, because someone had to, and now I’m learning the job in public.

Committee Desk started as my own notes. Every supervisory committee has roughly the same job — review the books, verify member accounts, make sure someone independent of day-to-day operations is actually checking the controls — but there wasn’t much free and self-serve that walks a brand-new volunteer through what that means in practice. NCUA publishes the rules and a guide. Trade groups sell training and certifications. What I couldn’t find was something short, plain, and free that just said: here’s what you’re on the hook for, here’s what to ask, and here’s what’s gone wrong at other credit unions and what a committee could have caught.

So I started writing that down for myself — a checklist built from the actual minimum audit procedures in NCUA’s regulation, a running list of enforcement actions worth learning from, questions worth bringing to a management meeting. None of it took much longer to publish than to keep private, so I’m publishing it.

That’s the honest answer to “why is this public”: it cost me almost nothing extra, and it might save someone else the same few months of confusion I went through getting oriented.

What that means for you, reading this

I’m not a regulator, a trade association, or a vendor. This site sells nothing, and there’s no membership or paywall behind any of it. It’s also not official guidance, and it shouldn’t be read as such — it’s one volunteer’s notes, checked against primary sources as carefully as I can manage, but still notes, not rulings. Where I’m not sure about something, I try to say so rather than guess.

Everything factual here is supposed to trace back to the actual regulation, order, or filing it’s based on — not to my summary of it, and not to someone else’s article about it. If I can’t find a primary source for a claim, I don’t publish it, or I flag it as unconfirmed rather than paper over the gap.

I’m also new at this, and I’m not hiding that. If you’ve been doing this for years and you read something here that’s wrong, incomplete, or dangerously oversimplified, I want to hear about it — that’s exactly the kind of correction this site needs, and I’d rather be told than leave something wrong online. The contact link in the footer reaches me directly, and I mean it when I say experienced committee members and auditors are the people best positioned to catch what I get wrong.

One more thing, since it matters for anything with “credit union” in the name: nothing here ever identifies a real member, a real account, or anyone’s private financial information. And even when a page covers a real enforcement action at a real institution, the point is never a verdict about that institution’s committee — it’s the general question worth asking at your own. I don’t know what any specific committee did or didn’t catch, and I’m not going to guess.

If any of that is useful to you, welcome. If you catch a mistake, please tell me.