Credit card transaction fees: tax payments: Consumer Inflation Reduction and Tax Fairness Act.

Bill text was reformatted from a printed document layout (with line numbers, page headers/footers, and traditional indentation) to a web page layout with navigation elements, version history links, and a publication date stamp.

Gratuity (tips) is no longer covered by the bill. The definition of 'gratuity' was deleted and all references to 'tax or gratuity' were changed to just 'tax.' Merchants can no longer claim interchange fee protection on tip amounts.

Three tax categories were removed from the list of covered taxes: Motor Vehicle Fuel Tax Law, Use Fuel Tax Law, and Diesel Fuel Tax Law. The bill now covers only sales/use tax, local sales/use tax, transactions and use tax, cigarette/tobacco tax, alcoholic beverage tax, and cannabis tax.

Senator Ochoa Bogh was removed as a coauthor; only Senator Cortese remains as the Senate coauthor.

A new subsection (100056(b)) allows a person or entity that knowingly engages in a pattern or practice of assessing interchange fees on the tax or gratuity portion of an electronic payment transaction to be subject to enforcement under the Unfair Competition Law (Business and Professions Code Section 17200 et seq.).

New factors courts must consider when determining liability: whether the entity had control over or access to the tax/gratuity data, whether it took reasonable steps to implement compliant processes for authorization, settlement, and fee computation, and whether any violation resulted from merchant or point-of-sale vendor error.

A new safe harbor provision (100056(c)) states that nothing in the section imposes liability on a payment card network, acquirer bank, issuer, or processor for errors, omissions, or misstatements in tax or gratuity data provided by a merchant or its point-of-sale vendor, as long as the entity did not knowingly disregard reliable information about such errors.

Three additional Assembly members (Garcia, Jackson, and Ward) were added as coauthors, broadening legislative sponsorship.