Five-dollar bill to get color makeover

WASHINGTON – Honest Abe is going to be more colorful after all.

The government said Wednesday it had reversed course and decided to redesign the $5 bill with a splash of color to keep counterfeiters at bay.

Originally, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing had planned to exempt the $5 bill and Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president, from the design makeovers introduced over the past three years for the $50, $20 and $10 bills.

But officials said they changed their minds in part so they could respond to a new scam in which counterfeiters are bleaching the ink off $5 notes and then printing counterfeit $100 bills on the bleached paper.

“We have to stay ahead of any threats we see evolving,” the director of the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, Larry Felix, said in an interview with the Associated Press.

Felix said the new colors for the $5 bill and other design changes had not been chosen, but probably will resemble the changes made for the other denominations.

Those included introducing pale colors into the background of the bills and adding various features in color, such as an American eagle in blue on the $20 bill and the Statue of Liberty’s torch in red on the $10 note.

Felix said Lincoln’s portrait will remain on the $5 bill, as will the Lincoln Memorial on the other side, but the presentations of both images may be updated slightly.

Under the timetable, the bureau will settle on a new design for the $5 bill by the fall of 2007 and hopes to begin introducing the new notes in the first quarter of 2008.

The announcement of the design change is being made now to provide time for the nation’s vending machine industry and transit companies to make the necessary changes in their equipment.