My name is Meryl Chertoff, and I direct the Georgetown Project on State and Local Government Law and Policy. I am also an adjunct professor at the Law School. I am here to testify in favor of B23-122.

Having five dollars in your pocket gives a person dignity. But in DC today, five dollars in your pocket no longer may buy you a cup of coffee, and its not because prices have gone up at the corner coffee shop. It is because an increasing number of businesses in the city won’t accept cash. The tech and financial services industry now has decided that efficiency dictates that the legal currency of the United States is unwelcome in a growing number of commercial establishments

“We are cash-free” signs blast at some local businesses. But who does that hurt? Some of us-the unbanked who are disproportionately people of color. And all of us: because the more transactions we are forced to do cashless, the less privacy each one of us has.

Around the country, measures are being adopted to protect Americans from yet another effort to make some of us second class citizens and to harvest data from the rest of us.

New York City last month became the latest jurisdiction to allow a customer to choose whether to pay using cash or cashless. Philadelphia passed a similar law in February 2019 and New Jersey did so the same year. In Massachusetts there has been a law on the books since 1978 that says that retailers cannot discriminate against a cash buyer by requiring the use of credit.

In 2017, the FDIC that roughly 8.4 million U.S. households were unbanked, and an additional 24 million were underbanked. Residents of the District have either no access to bank accounts or significantly limited access to financial services at higher rates than the national average. Of all households in the District, 29.4% had significantly limited access and 8% had no access, according to a 2017 survey from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.

Nationally, according to a 2015 FDIC survey 7 percent of U.S. households did not have a checking or savings account; among black and Latino households, that figure was more than twice as high, nearly 14%.

Many undocumented people also are unbanked, meaning that all their purchases must be made in cash.

While being low-income is not itself a category protected by Federal civil rights laws, the fact that an increasing number of businesses are going cashless means that they effectively discriminate against blacks, Latinos and the undocumented.

It also contributes to a sense that some are less equal citizens than others. I have seen this with my own eyes. At one DC retail establishment, co-located in a DC Government building, cash is not accepted. The homeless people who sometimes take shelter in this warm and welcoming building would not be able to buy even a cup of coffee in the co-located restaurant were it not for the compassion of the servers. One told me she will take cash from such people and use her own credit card to pay for the purchase of their soup or a coffee.

Cash is an equalizer. It gives anyone holding it dignity. A cashless model creates two tiers of retail: those reserved exclusively for the banked and those where everyone else can shop, eat and receive basic services. While it is true that cash in the till can attract crime, going cashless breeds the kind of class resentment that instigates crime.

Plain and simple, cashless perpetuates inequality.

I would be remiss if I did not note here that Georgetown students are concerned about these inequalities, and that The Hoya, the student newspaper at main campus, has done a terrific job of reporting on it, and has editorialized in favor of this bill based on the equity and dignity interests it protects.

Then there is the question of privacy. It is no surprise that the drivers of cashless business are largely big tech. For each transaction you do without cash, more data is harvested about your location, purchasing habits and preferences. A cash purchase– be it of coffee, cigarettes or medicine– allows you to maintain your anonymity. And if you think this sort of surveillance society based on your cashless purchases are far off, consider that in China, purchases are monitored and become part of the social credit score that determine your access to a variety of benefits.

Just because cashless businesses are only a fraction of those operating in DC today, numbers can change. In Sweden today bills and coins make up only 1% of the economy. Economics professor Kenneth Rogoff of Harvard estimates that the US is on a trajectory to the same point over the next 5-7 years. B23-122 is part of a trend that could slow that down.

Cashless means that the real world increasingly mirrors the online one: where every click, or in this case every swipe, allows the marketers to build a more granular profile of who you are. Many measures will be needed to put an end to that. B23-122 is a good start.