Regulators Will Expand Effort to Rescue S&Ls; : Thrifts: The plan is to find buyers or partners for institutions before they become insolvent and are seized by the government.

Hoping to save billions of dollars in bailout costs, federal savings and loan regulators will announce today a major expansion of their efforts to find buyers or viable partners for troubled S&Ls; before the institutions become insolvent and are seized by the government.

The program, called accelerated resolution, already has been used, on a limited scale, in 27 of nearly 600 failed S&Ls.; But it will now be tried more extensively as federal regulators handle the disposition of about 100 weak S&Ls; expected to become insolvent, according to officials.

“This is viewed as an important means of saving the taxpayer money,” Bill Fulwider, a spokesman for the Office of Thrift Supervision, said Sunday.

A federal seizure of an S&L; means that all its assets become the property of the Resolution Trust Corp., the agency that already has an inventory of $160 billion worth of mortgages, loans and securities, as well as shopping centers, office buildings, single family homes and thousands of acres of empty land.

The RTC must spend money immediately to pay off depositors--whose accounts are insured up to $100,000--hoping it can recoup some of the expenses later from the eventual sale of the assets in a real estate market already significantly depressed. The RTC already has spent $80 billion on such costs. The Bush Administration asked for another $80 billion, but a reluctant Congress approved expenditures of $25 billion until next April.

Regulators want to avoid additions to the already swollen inventory of S&L; assets. If they can find a buyer for an S&L; before it collapses, the new buyer will take over more of the assets, keeping them out of the hands of the government.

This approach first was proposed last year by Timothy Ryan, director of the Office of Thrift Supervision. But it was used in a comparative handful of cases because regulators were busy handling dozens of thrifts in dire financial straits that had to be closed immediately.

Now, most of the worst cases--those with the biggest continuing losses--have been dealt with, and regulators believe that they can spend more time on troubled but potentially salvageable S&Ls.;

“We’ve been working hard for the past two years to get the bad ones out of the market place,” said Stephen Katsanos, a spokesman for the RTC.

Candidates for the accelerated resolution must be troubled institutions heading for failure. But there cannot be evidence of fraud or impropriety in the financial statements--problems that make it impossible for a buyer to understand the true value of the institution, officials said.

The OTS will “shop around” the best of the failing institutions, offering them to healthy thrifts, banks or other investors, a regulatory official said. However, “there should be some interest already, some suitors who have indicated they might want to make a bid,” the official said.

To make the S&L; attractive, the government would agree to take some of the most troubled assets, such as some of the loans in default or the real estate and commercial properties considered very difficult to sell. The regulators would provide cash for these assets, making the deal more palatable to would-be buyers.

Although the regulators will make the S&L; sales effort a top priority for 1992, their prospects for success are uncertain. The economy is mired in recession, real estate prices are depressed and could fall even further. There may be few buyers for S&Ls; burdened with large portfolios of troubled real estate loans.

Perpetual Savings Bank, a Virginia thrift with nearly $4 billion in assets, has been on the block for months as part of the accelerated resolution program.

“It’s a big institution,” said Fulwider, the OTS spokesman. “You do not just go out and hand it to somebody. We believe it can be resolved by the end of the year.”

Bank regulators are also searching for ways to salvage institutions through sale and merger to avoid costly shutdowns. The bill recently approved by Congress to provide new funding for bank and S&L; cleanups gives the regulators expanded powers to intervene in troubled institutions long before they run out of capital and become insolvent.

The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank accounts up to $100,000, is working on its version of the early sales program devised by the federal S&L; overseers. William Taylor, the new chairman of the FDIC, recently told the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee that he is anxious to find ways to help ailing banks stay open. The FDIC plan should be ready early next year.