Marisa Calderon, President and CEO of Prosperity Now, delivered remarks at the Economic Growth and Regulatory Paperwork Reduction Act (EGRPRA) meeting on March 26, 2026. In her remarks, she draws on nearly five decades of Prosperity Now’s work with financial institutions and community partners to highlight how fragmentation across data, reporting, and processes creates unnecessary burden and limits the effective flow of capital. Below are her full remarks.

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Good afternoon and thank you for the opportunity to speak.

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My name is Marisa Calderon. I am President and CEO of Prosperity Now. For nearly five decades, we have worked with financial institutions and community-based partners to understand how housing finance systems operate in practice. That perspective allows us to see how reporting requirements, application processes, and examination expectations function across institutions and geographies.

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Many of the challenges that are often described as reporting burden or process inefficiency are, in our experience, a result of how fragmented the underlying system has become. Data is not consistently defined or shared across institutions; partnership models vary widely, and there is limited standardization in how activities are structured and documented.  

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For example, mortgage lenders today report more than one hundred data fields per loan under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act, while CRA reporting requires separate and differently structured data collection across small business, small farm, and community development activities. These systems are not interoperable, and even federal analysis of CRA performance requires combining multiple datasets to assess outcomes.

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As a result, institutions and their partners absorb significant operational costs simply to align and report on activity that is otherwise aligned in intent, with banks experiencing this as a reporting burden, while community partners experience it as friction. More importantly, this fragmentation makes it harder to move capital efficiently and at scale through the very systems CRA relies on.  

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In turn, this contributes unintended variability into how CRA is applied and evaluated, limiting the ability to clearly measure and compare outcomes across institutions and markets. It also makes it more difficult for capital to reach communities in a consistent and scalable manner.  

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We believe there is an opportunity to reduce unnecessary burden while improving clarity and consistency by focusing on greater alignment in data, measurement, and process. This includes how activities are defined, how they are documented, and how information flows between institutions and their community partners.

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Greater alignment and stronger supporting infrastructure would increase efficiency, strengthening the system’s ability to deliver on its intended purpose.

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Thank you for your time and consideration.

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