Of Course they Didn’t Intend those Unintended Consequences

Government regulation of the big bad, evil, poopyhead bankers has unintended consequences for the little guy. Whoda thunk it?

Big banks have been firing low-level employees like Eggers since the issuance of new federal banking employment guidelines in May 2011 and new mortgage employment guidelines in February.

The tougher standards are meant to weed out executives and mid-level bank employees guilty of transactional crimes, like identity fraud or mortgage fraud, but they are being applied across-the-board thanks to $1 million a day fines for noncompliance.

Overlawyered points out that two of the heinous criminals caught up in the dragnet are:

…a bank employee with seven years’ service who used a slug in a washing machine in 1963, and a 58-year-old customer service representative with a shoplifting conviction forty years ago.

Of course, one might argue that the intent of the law was to ensure the honesty and integrity of the greedy corporate banker fat cats slobs and not to allow said greedy…etc to use the threat of $1 million per day fines as a reason to fire good, honest, hard-working people at the low levels of the totem pole. There’s really no threat from the million dollar per day fines to the banks.  Surely prosecutors would know that these people have done their time and are entitled to the presumption that a clean plate over the past several decades means that they are not the devious douchebags that this law was intended to target.  Federal prosecutors would certainly use their discretion and not go after the bank for failure to fire a guy who spent 60 days in the county lockup back in 1972.  Surely, no prosecutor would ever abuse that discretion in order to further their careers.  Of course not.  Never.

Of course, if it did somehow happen, they’d be held accountable, right?  So this whole exercise is merely an excuse to get rid of employees that they don’t like.

It certainly couldn’t be another example of congress passing a I’m-tough-on-the-boogeyman-du-jour-look-what-I-did law without actually thinking it through.