The Obama Administration has labored to convince the public that it takes financial crimes seriously, despite copious evidence to the contrary. The latest effort comes in a leak to the New York Times, intimating that the Justice Department will pursue criminal charges against two large banks for misconduct, the first such charges since the financial crisis. (It’s worth noting that the promised charges refer to two foreign banks, do not envision charges against individual executives, and involve incidents of fraud against the government, rather than homeowners or shareholders). One of those two banks is Credit Suisse, accused of facilitating tax evasion for wealthy Americans through private bank accounts.

But just as the Justice Department wants us to believe it will take action against banks that harbor tax cheats, the IRS has robbed it of a critical enforcement tool by delaying enforcement of a signature anti-tax evasion law for two years. This amounts to little more than a whopping in-kind donation, both to wealthy tax dodgers, who get to keep their money away from the government’s prying eyes, and to financial institutions, which get another two years to look the other way at non-compliance with U.S. law. The decision, which comes after years of lobbying from the financial industry, makes a mockery of the alleged newfound toughness from the executive branch.

The law in question is called the Foreign Accounts Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), and it actually passed Congress in 2010, tucked into a separate jobs bill. Under the law, foreign banks are required to deliver information to the IRS about any accounts held by U.S. taxpayers, or even the accounts of corporate entities where taxpayers hold a “substantial ownership interest.” To force compliance, the law requires domestic financial institutions to withhold payments to those foreign banks unless they turn over the account records.

It is a sad commentary on the ways of Washington that a law passed four years ago wasn’t scheduled to go into effect until this July, but the Treasury Department and the IRS very deliberately put together final regulations, all the while signing agreements with 22 countries who have their own bank secrecy laws, like Switzerland, enabling banks in those countries to participate in the program. Treasury released the final rules package in February.

Foreign banks, which obviously want to retain the cash cow of wealthy tax evaders, have complained about the “heavy administrative burden” of reporting to the IRS. The Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, a lobby group, conducted a survey alleging that initial preparations for FATCA compliance cost its members $1 billion in 2013 and 2014. It’s not clear where that number was pulled from, but in fairness, it does sound big.