Citibank (NYSE: C) and J.P. Morgan Chase (NYSE: C), two of the nation’s largest credit issuers, are largely sidestepping the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act passed by Congress last May by changing fee structures and adding new “gotcha’s” to their credit card products.

One of the primary aims of the Credit Card Act was to reign in some of the high fees charged by Citibank, Chase, Bank of America and other credit card issuers. Congress attempted to rein-in fees by requiring a 45 day notice to customers of fee and interest rate changes, preventing automatic over-the-limit approval of transactions, and adding caps to high-fee credit cards. Banks are also now prevented from charging customers a fee to make payments over the phone.

The natural reaction from Chase and Citibank was to raise fees in other areas to make up for the lost revenue that they were regulated out of collecting. Both companies are now charging many of their customers an annual fee to have a credit card account. Chase is forcing some of their customers to choose between keeping their existing card and paying a $30.00 annual account fee or switching to a new card with a paltry rewards program.

Citibank started testing the waters with its customers last fall to see how much of an annual fee that the bank could charge customers without having a large percentage of them cancel their accounts. Citibank appears to have been happy with the results of their trial annual-fees as the company has announced that many of its customers, even those with great credit, will be charged a new annual fee of $60.00 starting in April if they do not spend more than $2,400 a year on their cards.

Both companies have also raised their fees for balance transfers. Before the most recent set of regulations from the Credit Card Act came into effect last week, the industry standard fee for a balance transfer was about 3%. Since then, both Chase and Citibank have increased the balance transfer fee to between 4% and 5% depending on the account that the customer has.

Congress’s attempt to reform the credit card industry was well intended to help give customers a fairer playing field when dealing with credit card companies, but Citibank and Chase naturally took the path of least resistance by raising other fees to maintain their previous levels of revenue.