Letter to the editor: Credit card swipe fee proposal would hurt consumers, small businesses

Some members of the Pennsylvania Legislature are making a misguided effort to exempt sales tax from credit and debit card interchange fees. I fear this radical change would adversely affect consumers and small businesses, including members of the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania.

Interchange fees are payments made by merchants to credit and debit card issuers to cover the cost of processing transactions. Eliminating interchange fees on sales and use taxes would create enormous complexities and operational challenges. For example, we may be forced to start carrying cash or checks to pay the sales tax every time we make a purchase instead of just swiping our cards as we do now to pay the taxes in the same transaction. Small businesses may have to process two transactions for one purchase — one for the product or service and another for the sales tax. This also could result in small businesses possibly needing to buy new software and spend more time filling out paperwork.

Pennsylvania should not be the test case for a radical experiment that has never been tried anywhere else. This change would bring only chaos to consumers and small businesses across the commonwealth.

Barãta A Bey

Downtown

The writer is president of the African American Chamber of Commerce of Western Pennsylvania.