2019 Bills

HB 378: Regulatory Sandbox for Market Innovation

This bill passed the House and Senate unanimously. 

Libertas Institute supports this bill

Staff review of this legislation finds that it is aligned with our principles and merits support.

All too often when a new innovative company bursts on the scene, regulators pounce and try to force the new company to conform to out-of-date and hardly related regulations. In other situations, an entrepreneur cannot even develop their product for the market because of existing regulatory hurdles that were written decades earlier.

Representative Marc Robert’s House Bill 378 seeks to give these types of new companies a chance to either develop, introduce, or continue to operate in the marketplace. The bill sets up a pathway for financial and peer-to-peer technologies to petition for relief from onerous regulations that poorly apply to their models.

Within GOED (the Governor’s Office of Economic Development) a committee would be established that would have the ability to hear from these innovative companies and the regulators that seek to constrict them. The committee would have the authority to give a temporary “permission slip” (up to two years) that would allow the company to develop or operate their business model without worrying about regulations that poorly apply to their model.

Utah likes to pride itself as being one of the most business friendly states in the nation and with the emerging prominence of Silicon Slopes, new technologies need breathing room to be able to develop innovative models that government regulations and/or regulators have not fathomed before.