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Israel unsure about banks' readiness for Y2K bug

09:58 a.m. Jun 08, 1999 Eastern

JERUSALEM, June 8 (Reuters) - With less than eight months left to go, the Bank of Israel said on Tuesday it could not adequately assess whether the country's banks were ready to cope with the millennium bug.

The central bank said that although the banks would have completed internal preparations by the end of June, many of their clients had not responded to requests for information about their readiness. ``At the end of March 1999, the level of responses by clients to questionnaires was only partial. Because of the low level, there is still no possibility of estimating the extent of clients' preparedness and its impact on the banks,'' the Bank of Israel said.

It estimated that Israeli banks had to date spent 260 million shekels ($63.6 million) on preparing their computer systems for the year 2000.

Banks have been instructed to set up back-up systems that will enable them to perform critical operations for several days in the event their main networks fail.

Israeli banks will be closed from December 31, 1999 through January 2, 2000 to ease the transition.

($1 - 4.09 shekels)

((Jerusalem newsroom, +972 2 537-0502, Jerusalem.newsroom+reuters.com))

Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

-- Linkmeister (link@librarian.edu), June 08, 1999.