Poker Superstars
Phil Hellmuth
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 It never gets old does it? Well, it’s going to take a lot of boatshaking and fistpumping before this little old Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA) just goes away. It’s going to take a lot of searing news rants and people getting involved before we’re allowed to play cards online freely in this country. Fortunately, there are some level-headed chaps left in the government who are willing to stand up, ie: Congressmen Barney Frank, Ron Paul, Luis Gutierrez and Peter King, who this week sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson expressing their trouble with the maligned bill.
This letter comes hot on the feel of the recent hearing wherein the proposed rules of the UIGEA were grilled, an event from April 2nd, where pretty much everybody and their mother stated how ridiculous and vague the whole thing is.
7 says later, Frank and Paul showed up with a bi-parisan bill that would stop the UIGEA by stopping Federeal Reserve employees from “proposing, prescribing, or implementing any regulation that requires the financial services industry to identify and block internet gambling transactions.”
Right on.
Frank is also responsible for introducing the Internet Gambling Regulation and Enforcement Act, which would allow gambling at a federal level.
Here’s the letter sent to Bernanke and Paulson on Monday:
“As you know, on Wednesday, April 2, the Committee on Financial Services Subcommittee on Domestic and International and Monetary Policy held a hearing entitled, “Proposed UIGEA Regulations: Burden Without Benefit?” to examine the regulations issued last year by your agency and the Federal Reserve on the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act (UIGEA). At that hearing, the testimony of your representatives and the industry made it clear that the regulations are unworkable. Subsequently, we introduced new legislation, H.R. 5767, which would prohibit their implementation.
The regulations, like the underlying legislation, fail to define the term “unlawful internet gambling,” leaving it to each financial institution to reconcile conflicting state and federal laws, court decisions and inconsistent Department of Justice interpretations, when determining whether to process a transaction. Furthermore, some of the information needed to make this determination would likely be unavailable to banks, because customers or financial institutions in foreign jurisdictions will likely be unwilling or unable to provide it. At the hearing, representatives from your agency and the Federal Reserve admitted that there are substantial problems in crafting regulations to implement the UIGEA in a manner that does not have a substantial adverse effect on the efficiency of the nation’s payment system.
Your agency and the Federal Reserve have been struggling to issue these regulations, but as the hearing made clear, the underlying statute makes your job extremely difficult, if not impossible. Given the many other priorities that are pending at your agencies, including the mortgage crisis, HOEPA, and UDAP rulewriting and many other issues, we believe it would be imprudent for you to devote additional agency resources to this Sisyphean task, especially as we intend to vigorously pursue legislation to prevent the implementation of these regulations.”
April 24, 2008 |
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