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Senate Banking Committee Chairman Bennett wants Year-2000-certified banks to be exempted from litigation in 2000. Passage of such legislation is pretty much predictable. There will be a flurry of laws exempting industries or groups within industries.
Problem: Who will certify a bank as Year 2000-compliant? Not the Federal Reserve. (See previous entry.)
Will there be such banks? So far, there aren't.
Pay close attention to the words, "other systems."
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The August 18, 1997 issue of the Washington Perspective, a newsletter published by America's Community Bankers, reports: "Sen. Robert Bennett (R-Utah), chairman of the Senate Banking Committee's Financial Services and Technology Subcommittee, has asked the federal banking regulators to help him develop legislation to shield banks from Year 2000 liability."
The article goes on to say that while Bennett felt regulators should do more to increase awareness of the problem and encourage efforts to fix it, he also thought that once financial institutions have been certified as Year 2000-compliant, they should be afforded some protection from "liability due to failures in other systems over which they have no control."
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