Third-Party IRS Payment By Phone with 2.5% Fee

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Would you like to pay your taxes with a credit or debit card via the phone? If so, be prepared to spend an additional 2.5% of your total payment amount to use one of the approved third-party payment services. Both the disengenuously named Official Payments and Pay1040 charge a two-and-a-half percent service fee (okay, 2.49% for Pay1040) for performing the simple task of taking your money and passing it on to the IRS.

Would you like to pay your taxes with a credit or debit card via the phone? If so, be prepared to spend an additional 2.5% of your total payment amount to use one of the approved third-party payment services. Both the disengenuously named Official Payments and Pay1040 charge a two-and-a-half percent service fee (okay, 2.49% for Pay1040) for performing the simple task of taking your money and passing it on to the IRS.

It might be the ultimate in sweetheart deals: getting people to pay unnecessarily high service charges on taxes. Why can’t the IRS do this themselves and pay for it out of—oh gosh, I really don’t know—our taxes?

The Consumerist was first alerted to these services via an official, taxpayer-funded mailing from the IRS.

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