My Account Visa card for tax refunds
- The American Treasury partnered with Visa and the card issuer Green Dot to test the deployment of Visa prepaid cards for social refunds: social benefits, tax refunds, etc. All in all, 600,000 cards will be distributed during this pilot test, 300,000 will be free. For the remaining 300,000, a 4.95 dollar monthly fee will be applied.
- In addition to being traditional payment cards, they also enable the cardholder to pay his bills (electric bill, for instance) and withdraw cash for free from ATMs belonging to Green Dot's network.
- This programme mostly aims to reduce the cost of processing social benefits (e-payments are less expensive to process than payments by cheque) and allow unbanked American households to receive and use these funds.
- This pilot test should enable the American Treasury to save more than 40.5 million dollars. Today, it issued almost 45 million cheques every year for tax refunds. Each one of these cheques costs one dollar compared to 10 cents per e-payment.
- These past few years, in Europe, several similar projects have started being developed. It should be noted that one of the first initiatives was implemented in the Netherlands by ABN AMRO. Ten thousand (Cirrus and Maestro) prepaid magnetic stripe cards were issued so that the cardholders could receive their social benefits. In 2008, the Italian government launched a “social” prepaid card to pay social benefits and help households with low income.
- The prepaid CESU and other vouchers and tickets provided by social services in France could also be dematerialised and use this prepaid format, notably in the SEPA environment, if the acceptance network is sufficiently equipped.