Banking Services: Cannabis Businesses Face Access Challenges

Filed 23h ago · Via GAO · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Baker, Cornelia, 1855- · No restrictions · via Wikimedia Commons

The Government Accountability Office reports that cannabis remains a federal controlled substance even as many states license it, leaving banks to weigh legal risk against community demand. FinCEN's 2014 guidance told institutions how to serve cannabis businesses while filing the required suspicious activity reports, and about 1,000 banks and credit unions did so in 2024, a number that has held steady since roughly 2019 after climbing from 2015.

But GAO's interviews with 74 financial institutions and 51 cannabis business owners found the guidance hasn't solved much: account closures, high fees, steep loan interest rates, and two major credit card companies refusing cannabis transactions entirely. Employees of these businesses reported trouble even accessing personal banking. The report notes plainly that filing a suspicious activity report doesn't mean a bank actually treats a cannabis business as an ongoing customer, just that a transaction happened once.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

Ten years of guidance and the count of banks willing to touch this money has been flat since your kid was in middle school. That is not a system working, that is a system everyone quietly agreed to leave broken because fixing it means Congress has to say the word cannabis out loud and vote on something. The businesses are legal in their states and treated like a leper colony by anyone with a vault, and nobody in Washington seems in a hurry to change that math.

Source: Read the original at GAO → Scored: Decline · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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