Congress warns Treasury on unusually short cryptocurrency short rulemaking
Bipartisan group of 9 members send letter to Sec. Mnuchin expressing concern over poorly considered rule
Closing 2020 out with a bang, a bipartisan group of members of Congress joined in the chorus of protests to the process by which the Department of Treasury is seeking to rush through its proposed regulatory and reporting requirement for cryptocurrency.
Nine members sent a letter to Secretary Mnuchin requesting an extension of the truncated 15 day comment period. Specifically. The letter expresses concern that the unusually short period allowed for comments does not afford the American public a reasonable opportunity to respond. Highlighting that the detailed and complex rulemaking was made public just before Christmas, with only eight work days to respond, the members request that the review period be extended to 60 days. We could not agree more. Regardless of what you believe about the substance of the rule, an abbreviated rulemaking will serve little purpose to inform the final policy decision.
Of course we do have serious issues with the substance of the proposed rule as we explain in our recent blog post and comment letter. In a sign of determined and certain opposition, we worked hard to make our views public as quickly as possible.
We have asked you to join in this opposition by sending a message to Secretary Mnuchin. Since we first asked you to join us in responding, Thousands have made their voices heard. If you have not already done so, perhaps this action from Congress can motivate you as a final act of 2020, or a way to kick off 2021.
There are a few ways you can add your voice to the chorus.
- If you are able, you should file a comment with FinCEN in the proceeding before the end of the day on January 4. Ideally you should write a unique and substantive comment letter and submit it at Regulations.gov. Here’s a great guide to doing that;
- If you can’t write a unique and substantive letter, then you can still help by submitting a comment using the form our friends at Fight for the Future have put up—you can modify the template comment with your own views;
- Finally, you can also submit a respectful message directly to Secretary Mnuchin by following this link that we have established: https://coincenter.good.do/fincen/fincen-email/.
Happy new year!
A direct download of this comment is available here.