Examiner Spotlight: Samuel P. Golden

In April 1982 Samuel P. Golden was sent to examine Penn Square, a small bank in Oklahoma City. The bank had sold to other banks billions of dollars in oil and gas credits, which were vastly overvalued. Within four months, Penn Square failed, starting a chain of bank failures that went into the next decade.

Examiners often got the blame for failures and were not popular with bankers or borrowers. “You were closing banks every Thursday,” Golden recalled. “We had a borrower at one of the little banks north of Houston that actually said, ‘I’m going to bring my rifle, and we’re going to line [the examiners] up, and we’re going to shoot them one by one, and I’m going to find the Black one, and I’m going to kill him first.’”

Golden’s experience dealing with banks and their customers during those tense times made him a natural to become the OCC’s first Ombudsman in 1993, where he oversaw appeals for banks and worked on consumer complaints.

He retired in 2008 after 34 years with the OCC.