Work on federal regulations to enforce an Internet gambling ban should stop, four lawmakers said in letters this week to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson.

“Given the many other priorities that are pending at your agencies, including the mortgage crisis … we believe it would be imprudent for you to devote additional agency resources to this Sisyphean task,” the lawmakers wrote. Sisyphus was a king in Greek mythology who was condemned to repeatedly roll a huge boulder up a hill only to watch it roll down again.

House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., and three other committee members — Reps. Ron Paul, R-Texas; Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.; and Peter King, D-N.Y. — signed the letters that were issued Monday.

Brookly McLaughlin, deputy assistant secretary for public affairs at the Treasury Department, said, “We are committed to giving fair consideration for all comments as the rulemaking process proceeds.”

Federal Reserve spokeswoman Susan Stawick declined comment.

The letters follow an April 2 House hearing where representatives of the financial agencies said they were struggling to write regulations to carry out the gaming restrictions Congress passed in 2006.

Louise Roseman, director of bank operations and payment systems for the Federal Reserve, testified an Internet gambling ban cannot be “ironclad.”

Roseman and Valerie Abend, a deputy assistant secretary for the Treasury Department, agreed the 2006 legislation does not define “unlawful Internet gambling.”

After that hearing, Frank and Paul introduced a bill to prevent the Federal Reserve and Treasury Department from going forward with regulations to implement the Internet gambling ban.

In their letters this week the lawmakers served notice that they intended to “vigorously pursue” legislation to shelve the rules, thus blocking the Internet gambling ban from taking full effect.

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Author Contact Info: Tony Batt, Las Vegas Review-Journal