[background, NYTimes]

[previous, NYtimes]

Dear National Credit Union Administration,

You win, we lose.

This is our notice of Voluntary Liquidation of the Internet Credit Union.

We write this hoping many of you will read it.

You did not need to crush this credit union.

You did not need to make it take over 18 months to charter, forcing 5,000 changes to our application documents.

You did not need to restrict our total loan portfolio to $37,000 when we had $1,000,000 in reserve for bad loans.

You did not need to keep us from lending $8,000 to a student, forcing him from college.

You did not need to keep us from originating mortgages for permanently affordable housing.

You did not need to keep us from working with other credit unions on their loans and our loans.

You did not need to force us to revoke the membership of our migrant farm worker members.

You did not need to send people into our offices every month for 2 years taking up our time.

You did not need to treat us like children. And yes, your people said they were “treating us like children” in a meeting with our board.

You didn’t need to laugh when Occupy sent you an application to start a credit union, snarking

”That is not going to happen.” And yes, an NCUA official said that while we were in your offices in DC.

You do not need to overreact every time the Federal Reserve sends you a letter like you did over bitcoin.

You do not need to sow fear into every small and medium sized credit union with your subjective rating system.

You can stop hurting, and start helping.

You need to stand up to the banks that want our membership rules to be arbitrary and shifting under us.

Technology has made starting and running a Credit Union easy.

We need you to not shut down 200 to 300 Credit Unions a year.

We need you to not start 1 or 2 Credit Unions a year, but start 500 credit unions a year (as used to happened before the NCUA existed).

You can create a 5 page application, that any group can submit in a month to get started.

You can leave new credit unions alone for a couple of years.

Clean house of your agents of shutdown, and replace them with agents of start-up.

Thousands of communities are not geographically clumped, let them start credit unions.

27% of our citizens are “underbanked” – your organization is part of the reason for this.

We need a distributed and robust banking system for deposits, transactions, and grassroots credit.

NCUA: Please fix yourself.

We need you… We need you to change.

Your Sincerely,

Members of the Board of the, now dead, Internet Credit Union

Internet Credit Union 2011-2015