Summary: GAO provided information on data problems identified during its audit of the Resolution Trust Corporation's (RTC) 1995 financial statements. GAO noted that: (1) the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) did not properly value its estimated recoveries on RTC receivership securities because it failed to consider changes in the RTC securities portfolio between December 1994 and December 1995; (2) FDIC needs to ensure that receivership securities are properly valued based on current information; (3) the representation and warranty contract database included nonguaranteed contracts with expired indemnification periods, which resulted in the possible overstatement of the estimated costs for representations and warranties; (4) FDIC needs to identify contracts with expired or soon-to-expire indemnification periods and exclude these contracts from the representation and warranty cost estimate; (5) RTC used data for calculating estimates of future recoveries of securitization reserves that was not verified by an independent review; (6) some formulas used to calculate the estimate were incorrectly updated; and (7) because these errors increase the risk that future errors will not be timely identified and corrected, FDIC needs to review the data verification process to ensure that it includes recomputation of data input formulas when appropriate and verification of data used to calculate inputs to the formulas.
