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GCN Home > August 30, 1999 issue

The Y2K Act promises more than it can deliver

No doubt you have heard that Congress has passed, and President Clinton has reluctantly signed, the Y2K Act. The act will not necessarily deliver anyone from legal troubles over the so-called millennium bug.

In fact, the act stops far short of absolving information technology companies of liability for problems caused by date code errors. Instead, it merely nibbles at the fringes of liability issues and is more concerned with court procedure than substance. Every time it seems to establish some rule of law or procedure, the act promptly undercuts it with provisos, limitations and exceptions.

For instance, the act grants defendants—mainly businesses—a limited exemption from penalties for failure to comply with a federal reporting requirement, if the reason is a date code problem. If a company meets a multipart test, it can assert a defense, described as an exceptional temporary failure to comply and called “Y2K upset.”

Open to interpretation

Madison Avenue would have a field day with this. For some individuals and small businesses, the exemption can also include some violations of a rule or regulation, and not merely a reporting requirement.

To qualify, the company must jump through several hoops, including the following:
  • The reporting failure cannot relate to threats to health, safety, the environment, or to the banking or monetary system.
  • The defendant must have made a good-faith effort to anticipate and prevent the date code problem, and the failure cannot be due to operational error or negligence.
  • Noncompliance must be “unavoidable in the face of an emergency’’ and “necessary to prevent the disruption of critical functions or services’’ with potential harm to life or property.
  • The defendant must submit notice 72 hours after becoming aware of the upset.
  • Companies must assert their defense before July 1.


Some businesses might find it cheaper to pay the penalty than to prove all the elements of this defense. Either way, we all have to live with the upset.

The act also contains provisions concerning failures to post residential mortgage payments; limits on punitive damages against certain individuals and small businesses; special proportional liability rules for noncontract damages, basically tort; a requirement for a 30- to 90-day advance notice to defendants before commencing a suit to permit remediation; rules requiring specific allegations of certain facts in such a lawsuit; and limitations on contract and tort damages. It goes on and on.



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