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America’s Community Bankers has strongly objected to a proposal by the Securities and Exchange Commission that would impose new burdens on banks, especially on smaller institutions, and has asked for an exemption for community banks.

The SEC has proposed clarifying and expanding current financial disclosures of valuation and "loss accrual" accounts, and imposing a new requirement to disclose tangible and intangible long-lived assets and their depreciation, amortization and depletion schedules.

ACB said it supports the SEC’s efforts to eliminate misleading and fraudulent earnings manipulation. However, ACB said it is "very concerned that the disclosures being proposed will impose significant cost burdens, particularly on small financial institutions, while providing information that may not be useful to investors, but that may be used by third parties to the detriment of the business."

ACB said the kind of detailed disclosure of valuation and "loss accrual" accounts proposed could be used against a company in litigation and in other adversarial proceedings with claimants and government agencies.

ACB also said the proposed reporting of disaggregated goodwill "will add significant filing costs without providing any significant increase in useful investor information." ACB said the Financial Accounting Standards Board is currently considering amendments to the financial presentation of these balance sheet items and it would be "unfortunate" to require two different sets of disclosures.