Frequently Asked Questions

Is there a fee?
Yes. Official Payments Corporation charges a convenience fee for this service. The fee is based on the amount of your tax payment as follows:

2.3% of the tax amount charged (rounded to the nearest cent)
Minimum fee: $1
Example of fee:

Tax Payment = $753.56
Convenience Fee = $17.33
Official Payments Corporation will tell you your fee before you complete your credit card transaction. You can decide whether or not to complete the transaction at that time.

This is the California website for paying online. California pays this financial corporation 2.3% of your tax dollars. Imagine if the state just processed these payments and pocketed the 2.3% itself or just did not charge. This is bullshit

 

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WHat about union dues. Is that a tax or a fee?

SHould members have a say how their money is used?

 

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This is not about a union. Unions are something different.

This is about a bank charging a convenience fee for taking tax dollars.

The Federal government does the same thing.

http://www.irs.gov/efile/article/0,,id=101316,00.html

 

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Nothing to be outraged about. It is either a fair rate or not. They should be able to see how much they charged total and then figure out how much they should have been paid for the service. if it was too high they can lower it next year.

I work in the federal gov't and I will say this, private contractors are a bajillion times better, more efficient, more concerned than gov't workers as a general rule.

I'd rather pay a bank than spend the same money doing the work with the government.

 

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2.35% is high for processing a credit card payment. You owe $10000. You pay $ 235.00 for using a credit card. Just frigging put a postage stamp on a check and save $235.00. At least, this is what I advise. Unless it is worth $ 235.00 not going to the post office

 

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Yeah, but I don't have any idea what type of software they had to create for this. Was it a full service site that guided you through preparation? Did they audit the returns? What type of disaster recovery/business continuity were required? Did this allow the gov't to shut down certain functions? If so what were the costs of those?

I'm not saying you are wrong. It may be too high. but just putting a number out there is not the whole story. not by a long shot.

 

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Why should this not be a government operation? It can almost certainly be done cheaper.

 

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The government sucks at new things. They don't attract the quality of people it takes, nor can they usually provide the incentives for the quality people to stay or be motivated to do better.

I dont' know what happened here, but I can tell you that the team I work on is providing a function that most assuredly should be a gov't function. And there are gov't entities above me that take credit for it, BUT the team of contractors that has actually created the solution and implemented the solution has had to drag the gov't folks kicking and screaming through the process.

If you took control of the project away from my team and handed it to the gov't before we began I guarantee you they'd still have a three or four person team arguing about the ten year plan to implement it. Whereas our team went from proposal to full operation in nine months.

now you can argue the gov't should be or could be better, but as it stands now if you want to implement something like electronic filing where none existed before, I would think you'd be far better served by taking that to a contract firm of some kind.

 

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We disagree on this. I see 5% of our federal and state tax revenues being juiced from the taxpayers and given to the banks. This is 5% of over a trillion dollars. Just do the arithmetic.

I guarantee, if you put me on a team with a software engineer , i could show you how to steal money from this operation.

 

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