Companies Touting Taxes by Credit Card

With April 15 around the corner, two major credit-card issuers are waiving a pesky processing fee to woo consumers to charge their taxes.

Morgan Stanley’s Discover Financial and MasterCard International, separately, are partnering with H&R Block Inc. to waive the 2.49 percent fee that consumers get hit with when they pay federal taxes by credit card. But their offer just applies to MasterCard debit cards and Discover credit cards — and only when consumers purchase H&R Block software from the companies’ Web sites and pay their taxes there.

The limitations to these promotions mean they may not appeal to a large number of customers. Still, “this is the first year we’ve done a program like this, and we hope it’ll encourage consumers” to use their credit cards for this purpose, said Roger Hochschild, president and chief operating officer of Discover Financial.

American Express Co. is using another tactic. The company notified cardholders in mid-January that they can redeem membership-reward points to offset the third-party processing fee.

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