Government Offices Get More Done for the People with Charge.com

It is true that we take a lot that our various forms of government – municipal, state, and federal – do for us for granted. After all – in addition to providing a plethora of other, much-needed services – they do pave our roads, clean our rivers, educate our children, fill our libraries with books, and care for our elders. They keep our emergency systems operating, and are among the first to offer relief after a disaster. In order to make all of these benefits available to the people, governments use money collected from them via taxes, fines, and fees for things such as hunting licenses, event permits, and parking tickets. Sometimes it takes an administration a while to get a project finished or address a situation that concerns its citizens, and many people wonder why that should be considering the large sums of money that it must be taking in each year. The reason is actually quite surprising to most – just like retailers, governments use payment processing companies to collect remittances, and these entities often operate with interests running contrary to their clients’.

Many administrations recognize that they need to process payments quickly, so they can get the money they need to keep their constituents happy. In order to speedily process all forms of payment that citizens regularly utilize – particularly credit/debit cards, since their use has steadily been rising over the past three decades – a government agency has to obtain merchant accounts from processors, and it usually requests a private one for the sake of security and expediency. A processor will promise to provide the agency with the account it wants, and bill some exorbitant fees accordingly – but there is a catch. The agency will usually not be given its own account. Instead, it will be bundled into one online merchant account, (the processor’s own), with several other businesses or administrations as a third-party user. As a third party on the account, the agency will have no control over the funds amassing in it. All of the monetary management will be handled by the credit card processing company, and it can place financial holds on the account for any reason – even if all the money in it belongs to other users. The government agency – like all the other clients duped into using the processor’s account – will have to sit and wait for its money to be released, and that can take up to several weeks.

Fortunately, Charge.com is one payment processor determined to help make the peoples’ money work for them for a change. Each client receives a private merchant account – free of third-party holds – and will see its funds deposited within that account 1-3 business days after the initial transaction. Some agencies will even qualify for Next Day Funding, and see their money added in within 1 day of a transaction occurring. Charge.com also has the most affordable rates available in the business today. Many customers pay as little as $0.15 for each transaction, and their processing fees are as low as 0.25%. Agencies can bid farewell to steep costs and save a lot with Charge.com – and that can all go right back into the communities they serve.