NEW PEOPLES BANKSHARES INC

Report of Independent Registered Public Accounting Firm

To the Shareholders and the Board of Directors of New Peoples Bankshares, Inc.

Opinion on the Financial Statements

We have audited the accompanying consolidated balance sheets of New Peoples Bankshares, Inc. and its subsidiaries (the Company) as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, the related consolidated statements of income, comprehensive income, changes in shareholders’ equity and cash flows, for the years then ended, and the related notes to the consolidated financial statements (collectively, the financial statements). In our opinion, the financial statements present fairly, in all material respects, the financial position of the Company as of December 31, 2024 and 2023, and the results of its operations and its cash flows for the years then ended in conformity with accounting principles generally accepted in the United States of America.

Basis for Opinion

These financial statements are the responsibility of the Company's management. Our responsibility is to express an opinion on the Company's financial statements based on our audits. We are a public accounting firm registered with the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (United States) (PCAOB) and are required to be independent with respect to the Company in accordance with U.S. federal securities laws and the applicable rules and regulations of the Securities and Exchange Commission and the PCAOB.

We conducted our audits in accordance with the standards of the PCAOB. Those standards require that we plan and perform the audit to obtain reasonable assurance about whether the financial statements are free of material misstatement, whether due to error or fraud. The Company is not required to have, nor were we engaged to perform, an audit of its internal control over financial reporting. As part of our audits we are required to obtain an understanding of internal control over financial reporting but not for the purpose of expressing an opinion on the effectiveness of the Company’s internal control over financial reporting. Accordingly, we express no such opinion.

Our audits included performing procedures to assess the risks of material misstatement of the financial statements, whether due to error or fraud, and performing procedures that respond to those risks. Such procedures included examining, on a test basis, evidence regarding the amounts and disclosures in the financial statements. Our audits also included evaluating the accounting principles used and significant estimates made by management, as well as evaluating the overall presentation of the financial statements. We believe that our audits provide a reasonable basis for our opinion.

Critical Audit Matter

The critical audit matter communicated below is a matter arising from the current period audit of the financial statements that was communicated or required to be communicated to the audit committee and that: (1) relates to accounts or disclosures that are material to the financial statements and (2) involved our especially challenging, subjective, or complex judgments. The communication of critical audit matters does not alter in any way our opinion on the financial statements, taken as a whole, and we are not, by communicating the critical audit matter below, providing a separate opinion on the critical audit matter or on the accounts or disclosures to which it relates.

Allowance for Credit Losses – Loans Collectively Evaluated for Credit Losses

Description of the Matter

As further described in Note 2 (Summary of Significant Accounting Policies) and Note 7 (Allowance for Credit Losses For Loans (“ACLL”) to the consolidated financial statements, the allowance for credit losses on loans (ACLL) is a valuation allowance that represents management’s best estimate of expected credit losses on loans measured at amortized cost considering available information, from internal and external sources, relevant to assessing collectability over the loans’ contractual terms. Loans which share common risk characteristics are pooled and collectively evaluated

by the Company using historical data, as well as assessments of current conditions and reasonable and supportable forecasts of future conditions. The Company’s ACLL related to collectively evaluated loans represented $7.5 million of the total recorded ACLL of $7.7 million as of December 31, 2024. The collectively evaluated ACLL consists of quantitative and qualitative components.

The quantitative component consists of loss estimates derived from a discounted cash flow model using external observations of historical loan losses adjusted for estimated prepayments and forecasts of future conditions over a reasonable and supportable period. The estimate considers large amounts of data in tabulating default, loss given default, and prepayment speeds and requires complex calculations as well as management judgment in the selection of appropriate inputs.

In addition to the quantitative component, the collectively evaluated ACLL also includes a qualitative component which aggregates management’s assessment of available information relevant to assessing collectability that is not captured in the quantitative loss estimation process. Factors considered by management in developing its qualitative estimates include: changes in general market, economic and business conditions; lending policies and procedures; experience and ability of management and staff; the nature and volume of the loan portfolio; the volume and severity of delinquencies and adversely classified loan balances; loan review system; concentrations of credit; the value of underlying collateral in determining the recorded balance of the allowance for credit losses; and legal or regulatory requirements and competition. This evaluation is inherently subjective as it requires estimates that are susceptible to significant revision as more information becomes available.

Management exercised significant judgment when estimating the ACLL on collectively evaluated loans. We identified the estimation of the collectively evaluated ACLL as a critical audit matter as auditing the collectively evaluated ACLL involved especially complex and subjective auditor judgment in evaluating management’s assessment of the inherently subjective estimates.

The primary audit procedures we performed to address this critical audit matter included:

/s/Yount, Hyde & Barbour, P.C.

We have served as the Company’s auditor since 2022.

Roanoke, Virginia

March 31, 2025