Why it Matters

Every year, thousands of banks, credit unions, investment advisers, and municipal finance offices file essentially the same financial data with multiple federal regulators, each agency demanding the information in its own format. A law passed in 2022 was supposed to begin fixing that. Three and a half years later, the agencies responsible for implementing it have already missed a key statutory deadline, and a final rule still does not exist.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office (GAO), released May 14, 2026, takes stock of where things stand with the Financial Data Transparency Act (FDTA), the law designed to modernize how financial data flows between regulated entities and the federal government. The picture it paints is one of slow-moving interagency machinery, unresolved costs, and a gap between what the law promised and what has actually been delivered.

The Problem the Financial Data Transparency Act Was Built to Solve

The United States currently has no government-wide system for standardizing the financial data that businesses and individuals must report to federal regulators. Nine major financial regulatory agencies — including the Federal Reserve, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — collectively administer more than 500 information collections. Many of those collections demand overlapping data, but each agency has historically collected it in its own way.

The result is a compliance burden that falls hardest on the entities being regulated. A community bank, for example, may file similar balance sheet data with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, and the FDIC, each formatted differently and submitted through separate systems. For smaller institutions, the cost in staff time and technology is not trivial.

The FDTA, enacted in December 2022 as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, was designed to address this by requiring covered agencies to jointly develop common data standards. The idea was to make financial data machine-readable and interoperable, so that a regulated entity could theoretically submit data once and have it automatically shared across agencies.

The potential upside is significant. The Securities Exchange Commission told GAO that machine-readable financial data allowed its enforcement staff to scan thousands of public company filings, ultimately leading to charges against six public companies and several individuals for securities law violations. A practitioner cited in the report noted that standardized legal entity identifiers could help the Department of Commerce calculate GDP figures more accurately, and give the Environmental Protection Agency a new tool for identifying the ownership of polluting facilities.

A Missed Deadline and a Rule That Still Doesn't Exist

The FDTA set a clear timeline. The nine covered agencies were required to jointly issue a final rule establishing common data standards by December 23, 2024. They did not meet that deadline.

In August 2024, the agencies published a proposed joint rule and accepted public comments through October 2024. But as of January 2026, the agencies had not identified a date to publish the final rule and were still reviewing comments. As of May 1, 2026 — the date GAO completed its audit — no final rule had been published.

GAO noted in its report that its prior work has found that gaps in leadership during presidential transitions can impair complex government-wide efforts, leading to delays and missed deadlines. The FDTA's implementation straddled exactly such a transition.

The three interagency workgroups responsible for driving the rulemaking — a Chief Data Officer's Group, a staff-level "Brass Tacks Group," and a Technical Subgroup — operate by consensus, with no single agency designated as lead. GAO's prior work on interagency collaboration has identified that arrangement as one that can slow decision-making, particularly when agencies have competing priorities or resource constraints.

What Implementation Would Actually Cost

The GAO report does not minimize the complexity of what the FDTA is asking agencies and regulated entities to do.

On the agency side, regulators may need to modernize legacy data systems, coordinate across organizations with different cultures and mandates, and absorb ongoing data governance costs. On the private sector side, reporting entities face costs for updating internal systems, conducting testing, and obtaining and annually renewing legal entity identifiers — a fee-based international standard the proposed rule would adopt.

Representatives from associations representing state and local government finance offices raised particular concerns. They told GAO that additional staffing requirements stemming from the FDTA would likely fall disproportionately upon smaller entities, including small municipalities that lack the administrative capacity of large financial institutions.

One practitioner offered a blunt assessment of the timeline: it may ultimately take a decade or more to fully implement the FDTA before any movement toward a government-wide reporting mechanism becomes possible.

How the U.S. Compares Internationally

The GAO report situates the FDTA within a broader global conversation about Standard Business Reporting, a model in which governments create a single, standardized taxonomy for all regulatory filings, allowing businesses to submit data once across multiple agencies.

The international comparisons are instructive. The Netherlands adopted Standard Business Reporting and reduced the number of unique data elements reported to the government by approximately 98 percent, from roughly 200,000 to approximately 4,500 over about a decade. Australia, between 2008 and 2014, cut its unique reporting terms from 35,000 to 7,000, a reduction of more than 80 percent. New Zealand, Finland, and Sweden have implemented similar systems.

The United States has no equivalent.

Three of the four practitioner groups GAO interviewed said the FDTA could serve as a first step toward a government-wide mechanism similar to what those countries have built. The fourth was more cautious, saying the FDTA's narrow scope means it will not, on its own, put the U.S. on that path — though it acknowledged that the law represents progress toward consistency. All four groups agreed that the technology to build such a system already exists. The obstacles, they said, are interagency coordination and the challenge of establishing and maintaining shared data standards over time.

Who Is Watching

The GAO report was requested by the leaders of both congressional committees with jurisdiction over financial regulation. On the Senate side, that means Banking Committee Chairman Tim Scott and Ranking Member Elizabeth Warren. On the House side, Financial Services Committee Chairman French Hill and Ranking Member Maxine Waters.

The bipartisan nature of the request reflects the fact that regulatory reporting reform has rarely been a partisan flashpoint. Reducing compliance burdens on regulated entities appeals to Republicans; improving government transparency and regulatory oversight appeals to Democrats. The FDTA itself passed as part of a must-pass defense bill with broad support.

But bipartisan intent has not translated into bipartisan speed. The agencies charged with carrying out the law have now missed their statutory deadline by more than a year, with no clear finish line in sight. For the banks, credit unions, investment advisers, and municipal offices still filing duplicative reports with multiple agencies, the promise of the Financial Data Transparency Act remains, for now, exactly that.

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