Company: JUSHF
Filing Date: 2025-03-06
Form Type: 10-K
Source: 0001628280-25-010947
Chunk: 10

Company: Jushi Holdings Inc.
Filing Date: 2025-03-06
Form: 10-K
Item: Item 1
Chunk 10
---
2014 FinCEN guidance allows financial institutions to reasonably rely on the accuracy of information provided by state licensing authorities where states make such information available.

Unlike the Cole Memo, 2014 FinCEN guidance remains effective as of the date of this Form 10-K. During the Trump Administration, Secretary of the Treasury Steven Mnuchin publicly voiced his intent to leave such guidance in force and effect. The current Secretary of the Treasury, Janet Yellen, has not provided any public comment regarding her positions on the 2014 FinCEN guidance, but has previously indicated that she would be in favor of legislation that would provide safe harbor to financial institutions that worked with state-legal marijuana-related businesses. Nonetheless, despite FinCEN’s guidance, most banks and other financial institutions are still unwilling to provide banking or other financial services to marijuana businesses resulting in largely cash-based operations. While the FinCEN guidance decreased some risk for banks and financial institutions that accept marijuana business, it has not increased the industry’s access to banking services because financial institutions are required to perform extensive, continuous customer diligence respecting marijuana customers and are not immune from prosecution based on transacting business with such customers. In fact, some banks that had been servicing marijuana businesses have been closing the marijuana businesses’ accounts and are now refusing to open accounts for new marijuana businesses due to cost, risk, or both.

10

Although the Cole Memo was rescinded and FinCEN’s guidance has not made financial services widely available to legal marijuana businesses, a key legislative safeguard for the medical cannabis industry remains in place. Specifically, certain temporary federal legislative enactments that protect the medical marijuana industry have also been in effect. For instance, certain marijuana businesses receive a measure of protection from federal prosecution by operation of a temporary appropriations measures that has been enacted into law as an amendment or “rider” to federal spending bills passed by Congress and signed by both Presidents Obama and Trump. First adopted in the Appropriations Act of 2015, Congress has since included in successive budgets a “rider” that prohibits the DOJ from expending any funds to enforce any law that interferes with a state’s implementation of its own medical marijuana laws. The rider is known as the “Rohrbacher-Farr” amendment after its original lead sponsors (it is also sometimes referred to as the Rohrabacher-Blumenauer Amendment or the Joyce-Leahy Amendment). In 2021, President Biden proposed a budget with the Rohrbacher-Farr amendment included. The amendment has been renewed numerous times since then and