sloth unleashed

Despite significant questions from other elected officials about the plan, the White House has, in fact, approved new regulations requiring banks to stop any financial transactions dealing with online gambling. They’ve given banks one year to figure out a way to deal with it — which hopefully gives Congress enough time to change the law.

The regulations make little sense for a variety of reasons:

1. It’s still not clear why online gambling should be made totally illegal, rather than simply regulated, like in many countries.
2. It makes no sense to put the burden and liability on financial institutions to figure out what transactions involve online gambling.
3. It makes even less sense to dump this on banks right now, especially as many are struggling merely to survive in this financial climate. Adding an extra burden of making them figure out if every transaction involves online gambling seems unnecessary (and perhaps unusual).
4. Congress had asked the White House for more time to explore the impact of these regulations, but the White House used a lobbyist to aggressively push for these regulations to be put in place as quickly as possible.

Congress and the new administration will hopefully take up this issue next year, and remove this unnecessary burden from banks before it was set to go into effect.