Capital One accused the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. on Wednesday of imposing an “outsized and improperly calculated” $474.1 million special assessment fee to refill its Deposit Insurance Fund following the 2023 failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank, court documents show.
The agency erroneously included a $56 billion position between two Capital One subsidiaries as uninsured deposits, inflating what Capital One owed, the bank said.
Based on its revised December 2022 call report, Capital One should have been required to pay $325 million, it said.
“In a series of communications with the FDIC spanning the past two years, [Capital One, N.A.] has demonstrated that the Intercompany Position has been wrongly included in the invoiced special assessment amount and that the invoice is therefore incorrect,” Capital One wrote. “The FDIC nonetheless persists in seeking to collect a special assessment based on its erroneous calculation.”
Despite Capital One’s attempts to resolve the dispute, the FDIC told the bank it could either pursue an administrative appeal or litigate the issue, according to the lender.
The bank has asked the court for a declaratory judgment stating that the intercompany position is not a deposit, that the FDIC’s special assessment calculation was incorrect, and that Capital One does not owe the $149 million plus penalties the FDIC claims are owed.
The FDIC declined to comment. Capital One and an attorney representing the bank on the matter did not respond to an immediate request for comments.
SVB and Signature Bank collapsed and were seized by the FDIC in March 2023, days apart from one another. Most of these banks’ deposits – 88% and 67%, respectively – were above the FDIC’s $250,000 insured deposit threshold, therefore being “uninsured.”
The FDIC used funds from the DIF to protect uninsured depositors. To recoup those funds later that year, the FDIC implemented a special assessment on the nation’s largest banks.
In June, the FDIC estimated that the special assessment added up to $18.6 billion from 111 different banks.
