Quick tip for those who use Visa gift cards to pay their taxes: OfficialPayments, one of the tax payment processors, is no longer processing any type of Visa gift cards as debit cards.
Some people like to liquidate Visa gift cards by paying taxes with them. The fee is around $2.50 per card. The issue is that you can only make two tax payments per quarter per payment processor.
To get around this problem, some people use OfficialPayments since they allow wrapping multiple Visa gift cards into one payment when calling in and making the payment over the phone. Though the $2.25 fee remains for each card separately, it pushes the amount of Visa gift cards to an unlimited amount so long as all are processed during a single phone call.
Numerous Flyertalk members report that the system now rejects all sorts of Visa gift cards as payment. Presumably, they’d be able to process as credit, but that has a much higher fee.
The issue is exclusive to OfficialPayments as of now. Other processors still accept Visa gift cards as debit; as noted, there is the two-payment limit.
[READ:Â A Complete Guide To Paying Your Federal Taxes With A Credit Card]
It’s interesting that this crops up right after Visa told Plastiq that they can’t make mortgage/rent payments, though it’s likely unrelated since the OfficialPayments issue affects debit only, presumably.
Hat tip to reader Testing
