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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty rampant across all levels of government. A couple of examples:

- Several states/counties/cities/etc add a surcharge for credit card payments or transaction/processing fees for things like vehicle registration, paying traffic tickets, obtaining court records, paying property tax, etc.

- Prisons and jails are really terrible with junk fees for both the prisoners and for systems set up for their friends/families to call or message them, send them food/sundries, etc. They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system.

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> They also promote a system where you deposit funds in even chunks of $10, $20, $30, etc...then they keep the uneven remainder when you're no longer using their system.

Sounds like the meal plan at my kid's college. Unsurprising that they pattern their systems after those used to manage prisoners?

I fail to see how passing on a credit card processing fee is rampant corruption.

When the fee is clearly higher than what it's costing them. Either by the percentage itself, or often, a "minimum fee amount" that really exceeds the actual cost. A $2 minimum charge, for example, is somewhat common for things where the item/service is often much less than $100.

In one of the linked articles it shows one campsite who charged 5 dollars for a reservation but BAH was charging the campsite 6-8 dollars for the reservation. So they raised their prices to cover the more than 100% fee that the campsite had to pay for a service they used to offer for no extra charge to an organization they were forced to enter into by the state. Then BAH won’t disclose anything about the fees and contract so we have a black box of a contract making god knows how much money in a monopoly.

You could say well I don’t know how Ticketmaster absorbing all competitors and becoming a defacto monopoly and charging 30% fees to the buyer and 30% fees to the booker and is rampant corruption since they’re just passing on credit card processing fees.

If the credit network is going to charge you, say, 2% to process the transaction, why not make the user pay for that compared to much cheaper transaction methods, like direct bank transfers?

The complaint is that the fee is often much higher than the actual cost. Actual cost, of course, varies by card type. Debit cards, for example, have a VERY SMALL average processing fee, AMEX has a large fee. Also, "minimum fees" that end up being much higher than the actual cost.

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