mr. van der weide. chairman neugebauer, ranking member capuano, and members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to discuss section 939a of the dodd-frank help achieve the important goal, section 939a requires all federal agencies to review their regulations for references and requirements related to credit for many years before the introduction of credit rating under federal regulations, investor to use credit ratings to assist them in making investment decisions. credit ratings provide a uniform market driven, third party assessment for creditworthiness of countries, state and local governments and countries. federal agencies later and corporate credit ratings into the right framework in part because of the same attributes. the recent financial crisis, however, made serious flaws with the methodology and processes around the determination of credit ratings, particularly ratings for structured finance positions. these flaws contributed issues of credit ratings of security under estimate t