The U.S. Treasury Department is dragging its feet in writing regulations to accompany a law designed to stop the use of credit cards to pay for Internet gambling.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., went to see Treasure Secretary Henry Paulson on Thursday to ask about the delay.
“Are they going to be committed to enforcing this law," Brownback asked, "and putting the personnel in place that it needs."
The Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act passed last year, but the Treasury Department has yet to draft the rules for enforcement.
Chad Hills, gambling analyst for Focus on the Family Action, said writing them up shouldn’t be too burdensome.
“We estimate that about five federal employees working on this could keep and maintain a list of Internet gambling operations,” he told Family News in Focus.
Illegal Internet gambling is a $12 billion-a-year industry, and Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council said the pressure to water down the restrictions via the Treasury Department is intense.
"The gambling forces seem to have some friends in those departments that might have been helping write some of those regulations," he said. “It’s almost setting up a fourth branch of government – a bureaucracy branch – that decides what laws they want to enforce and what laws they want to basically rewrite.”
(Paid for by Focus on the Family Action)
