Summary for Congressional bill HR 2076 (114th): Allows legal marijuana companies to open bank accounts. In Depth: The FDIC is a federal (national) institute that guarantees a bank’s deposits.

However, since marijuana is illegal on the national level, banks can run into trouble.

Banks are not allowed to knowingly serve a customer who is engaged in illegal activities. Vote Yes if you believe: If someone is running a legal business, they should be able to open a bank account. #FreeMarket #Banking

A cash-only business encourages criminals to rob them. #Crime #Marijuana #Cash

A cash-only business would encourage them to not pay all their taxes. #TaxRevenue #Cash Vote No if you believe:

This would help criminals launder money. #Crime #MoneyLaundering

Marijuana is still nationally illegal, so banks should not be given a special exception. #Marijuana #Banking

Congress.gov listing for HR 2076

(This is the 1st draft of the summary for a bill in Polinav. Summary & In-Depth is non-partisan & Vote yes/no reasons are fact-checked. If you think something is wrong, should be added or deleted, comment below!)

I’ve been working on these privately, but thought I’d share these. Feel free to suggest edits :). So the plan is to share our draft of the summaries we’re working on & then I’ll write a little bit more about the issue at hand.

So the main issue at hand here is that banks can’t risk letting marijuana businesses open accounts with them, or else they can lose privileges like FDIC protection ($250k guarantee on deposit) on the federal level. So they choose to not let marijuana businesses open accounts to mitigate their risk. So even though these businesses are legal in the area they’re conducting their business, because of the Schedule 1 categorization at the federal level, banks won’t do it.

Imagine being a business with a million dollars of revenue every year and having to conduct your entire business in cash. They literally have to carry bags of cash around. It makes them much easier targets to get robbed. It also makes it harder for the government to collect taxes on it.

The main argument on the other side is that it’ll make it easier for criminals to launder their money, but banks are still obligated to make sure the business account they have is conducting a legal business, so banks would likely do a very thorough examination of marijuana businesses to protect themselves. Outside of that, the main reason people wouldn’t want to vote for this is because they’re just against marijuana itself.

I would want my representatives to vote YES on this bill!