Happy New Year! I just reviewed my message to you from January of 2021. The gist of it was about recovering from 2020 and moving back to “normal” despite some unknowns, some “bumps in the road.”

And now here we are after another full year of the pandemic! I find myself having to say again, I hope your health and the health of your business remains good.

2021 was certainly not normal and not just a bump in the road to recovery from the pandemic; it was its own shocking year. Now it seems recovery looks like supply chain issues, inflation, and a volatile stock market.

In this issue, we recap some of our core activities – licensing, examinations, and enforcement. I hope seeing this information summarized for the year gives you an idea of how busy and how successful we have been at completing our core functions, despite increases in license volumes and all remote examinations.

Keep in mind the summaries do not include the very important functions of keeping ourselves trained and replacing the staff we lost during the year.

Finally, we achieved reaccreditation of our mortgage program and received our initial accreditation for our money services businesses program, only the third state in the nation to accomplish that.

This year we will continue our work with other states toward networked supervision. This means continuing with the one company one examination program, conducting joint exams, accepting exam reports from other states’ examinations, and using coordinated tools like SES, the state examination system.

We are looking forward to the pandemic receding, conducting exams at our licensees’ places of business when safe to do so, and being together again as work colleagues.

I wish you the very best this year. Always feel free to contact me with any questions.