White House restates threat to block ‘bug’ liability laws
Y2K Update
White House restates threat to block bug’ liability laws
A Healthcare InfoTech Staff Report
The White House on Thursday repeated its position that it will veto legislation that would provide liability protection for small companies hit by Y2K lawsuits, saying that such a bill would fail to protect consumers hit by the millennium bug.
The legislation continued to be a political football this week as the Senate turned thumbs down on a vote to proceed with debate on a Y2K liability.
Though such a bill has been approved by the House, it has twice been torpedoed by unrelated issues in the Senate. Previously, the addition of minimum wage amendments killed it off, and on Tuesday, Democrats said that gun control legislation should come first on the priority list. The vote to debate fell seven short of the 60 votes required.
As with the House legislation, the Senate proposal would give companies a 90-day period to rectify Y2K problems, encourage mediation and put caps on punitive damages sought against companies with fewer than 50 employees.
The Senate vote to stall the action brought charges from the Information Technology Association of America (ITTA; Arlington, Virginia) that "partisanship" and even "next year’s presidential election" were blocking action on the legislation, with ITTA President Harris Miller calling the inaction "bad for consumers and bad for the economy."
The ITAA says that it represents 11,000 direct and affiliate members that produce products and services for the IT industry.
In a statement from the group, Miller said that "Each day lost to political point-scoring is a day lost to businesses interested in the constructive resolutions of their Year 2000 software problem."
Meanwhile, the proposed legislation has been changed somewhat with amendments offered by a group of Democrats. The changes would drop a provision protecting individual corporate officers and directors of companies from being sued and would drop most caps on punitive damages.
The changes which have been called an attempt to make the legislation more bipartisan did not satisfy the Clinton administration, which said the bill still does not offer sufficient protection against Y2K problems for consumers.
Also on Tuesday, a Commerce Department official just returned from a trip overseas said that some of the world’s major Y2K disruptions are likely to occur in Russia and parts of Europe that have not done the necessary planning.
Robert Shapiro, economics undersecretary for the department, said that Germany, northern Europe and the United Kingdom seem to be prepared but that Russia and portions of southern and eastern Europe could suffer major disruptions.
Bruce McConnell of the International Y2K Cooperation Center said Y2K "is a case study in how countries depend on each other and how parts of the global economy depend on each other."
USA Today quoted an executive with Deutsche Bank Securities as putting the chances for a Y2K-related global recession at 70%.
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