Towns, Cities and Counties Government Payments - Tax Payments | Court Management | Parks & Recreation Management

Towns, Cities and Counties

Since 1994 Visa®, MasterCard® and American Express® have prohibited local governments from assessing fees to citizens on face to face credit card transactions. This all changed in 2008. Now you can accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express and Discover for Tax Payments and MasterCard, American Express and Discover for all other departments and operations and assess a fee back to your citizens, for transactions in your office. allowing you to implement credit card acceptance at no cost.

Your options include either a standalone virtual terminal or an integrated (into your existing software) solution. The virtual terminal can be setup in approximately a week. The integrated solutions are time dependent upon the software provider, but have been completed in less than two weeks. If you are interested in the integrated solution please send us an email with your software's point of contact info and copy them on the email requesting that they consider integrating our solution. Send your email to info@GovernmentPaymentProcessing.com.

A key component of either solution is that the convenience fee be automatically calculated prior to authorization and then submitted and processed as a separate transaction from the fees or taxes being paid. This automatic split transaction functionality, is not part of most solutions presently in the market and is REQUIRED to participate in Visa's Tax Payment Program (including online payments). Any Town, City or County that wants to assess a fee back on credit card transactions, regardless of whether it is online, over the phone, in the mail or in person must meet these requirements and must be registered with Visa as of October 4, 2008 or they will be non compliant with Visa operating rules and subject to termination from processing Visa transactions and/or fined.

In addition Visa® requires a special convenience fee rate on their consumer debit cards for Tax Payments not to exceed $3.95. Percentage based fees on Visa® consumer debit cards or fixed rate fees greater than $3.95 are prohibited as of October, 2008. Any solution you select should have the Visa Bank Identification Number (BIN) database integrated into the payment servers so that Visa consumer debit cards are automatically identified on tax transactions and the $3.95 fee is automatically substituted prior to authorization.

For more information see recent articles in:
American City and County
GFOA Treasury Management Newsletter
Government Technology.

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