Is it legal to charge a percentage service fee? The example is ACME Company has a payment processing system that companies X, Y, and Z can use. It enables more features than just "payment" processing, and it enables more than just "credit card" payments. However, ACME Company wants to avoid adding a surcharge into the model for the customers but needs to charge the Slip Credit Card processing fee and still make a profit. So it wants to charge a 10% fee to the company requesting to use the payment processing function of its service. So Jon Doe goes to company Z and buys a widget using his credit card for $100 USD. Company Z uses ACME's service, so ACME takes $10 and transfers $90 into the bank account of Company Z. Company Z ships the product. Somewhere along this beautiful interaction between buyer and seller, ACME company needs to charge that fee. Is that fee legal? Some states prohibit the use of Convenience Fees and Transaction Fees, does that prevent the company to company transactions or is that just buyer to seller. Many payment processors like Paypal, Stripe, Visa, and Master Card all charge a transaction fee to the business. Therefore the company calculates it's pricing to reflect the cost to the consumer. Generally, consumer's are unaware that Mastercard, Visa, AMEX, Stripe, and PayPal all charge a processing fee. If the consumer new, the consumer would opt for the lowest percentage transaction fee. This is why many of those companies tell business to eat the cost. My question, in the example provided above, is it lawful for ACME company to charge a 10% fee? If so, legally should it be called a "Transaction Fee" or a "Service Fee?" If not, does that mean all those fees from Mastercard, Visa, AMEX, Stripe, and PayPal are illegal? (in some states and countries)
Credit card surcharges, where a customer is charged extra for using a credit card, are prohibited in 11 states. There are also 10 states that allow merchants to offer cash or non-credit discounts, and at least in those states there is increased awareness among consumers that credit card companies charge fees. There is no law requiring credit card companies to offer their services for free, so yes, it is legal for Visa et al. to charge vendors for using a credit card. There is no principle of law that dictates what such a fee would be called, so "Transaction Fee", "Swipe Fee" and "Service Fee" are all equally good. If Visa were to charge 10% to vendors, they would probably lose all of their business, but it would not be illegal.
This question sounds to me like there is an inferred intent of the person giving the invoice to manipulate their value added tax rate due to the misclassification, and then an unrelated issue related to an overly high charge for the services which are basically independent. Is the classification of the job material in some way to either of those issues in a non-obvious way that you haven't clarified in your question? I will answer on the assumption that it is not, because at first glance, it is hard to see why this would matter with respect to either issue. A CVR listing is sort of half way between a U.S. Secretary of State company listing and a U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission company listing with more than just bare bones contact information but less than a full fledged public company's disclosure statement. The fact that the company's business type classification is not a precise match for the kind of work that they did for you on this job is not obviously material to either what VAT taxes would be due (which usually depends upon the particular kinds of goods and services involved in the transaction) or the rate that a company can charge for a particular kind of work done. The fact that a company is classified in one category that describes the overall enterprise doesn't mean that every last thing done by the company must precisely fit that description. The mismatch could also conceivably be nothing more than a clerical error made by somebody preparing the CVR listing, in which case, again, the answer is "so what?" Therefore, as far as I can tell from the limited information in the question, this is just an immaterial error with no relevance to any of the likely disputes that you might have in this case. Usually, an immaterial error in a public record or invoice would not be a ground to object the amount that a company charged for the work, nor would it be something that would be appropriate to complain about in any way that would bring you an advantage that I can see in this transaction. This doesn't mean that you don't potentially have grounds to object to the invoice and dispute the higher than expected charges. But, bringing up the issue of the CVR code doesn't appear to add anything to your rights in this dispute. This said, I can certainly imagine circumstance where the wrong CVR code could be a hint that something else really is amiss. For example, suppose that you need a license to do a cleaning job since it involves environmental hazards and waste disposal, but you don't need a license to do management consulting, because who cares if someone is stupid enough to take your bad management advice. In that situation, the company might be misclassified because it doesn't have and perhaps cannot get for some reason, the business license that it needs to do the cleaning job. Charging for services while not having the proper business license might very well be illegal and a ground not to pay, and the error in the CVR filing might actually be an attempt to circumvent this problem. But, that kind of possibility relies upon pure speculation and without more facts there is no good reason to assume that something nefarious is going on here.
Can my water district's billing practices still be legal? They are likely to be legal, but it isn't entirely clear. Contract Law ETo data is not published in advance of billing, which seems to violate Contract Law's notion of agreement between parties. A contract can set forth a formula for determining a price, rather than a particular dollar amount. For example, my utility company charges me a rate for electricity and natural gas that is based upon the market price of those commodities that it has to pay (although since my utility is a regulated utility, it has to get approval from a government agency each time it does so to confirm that it is really charging the market rate). Similarly, in the construction industry, and in government contracts, &quot;cost plus&quot; contracts that charge based upon whatever is spent to get the job done plus a market up by the general contractor, are not uncommon. Proposition 218 The Proposition 218 analysis is trickier. This is clearly not a tax or an assessment. So the threshold question is whether this is a Property Related Fee. In December of 2018 a legislative analysis stated that: A fee is a charge imposed on an individual or business for a service or facility provided directly to an individual or business. Local governments charge fees for a wide range of purposes, from park entry fees to building plan check fees. The amount of the fee may not exceed the cost of government to provide the service. Proposition 218 restricts property-related fees, defined as fees imposed &quot;as an incident of property ownership.&quot; At this time, there is no consensus as to which fees meet this definition. The drafters of Proposition 218 indicate that it was their intent to include most fees commonly collected on monthly bills to property owners, such as those for water delivery, garbage service, sewer service, and storm water management fees. Other analysts of Proposition 218 contend that fees that vary by level of service (for example, a fee for metered water usage) should not be considered a property-related fee, because it is based on service usage, rather than property ownership. Because Proposition 218 does not restrict nonproperty-related fees, the definition of this term will be an important and sensitive issue for the Legislature and courts. But, the California Supreme Court clarified this in July of 2006 in the case of Bighorn-Desert View Water Agency v. Verjil, ruling that metered rates for consumption of water are “property-related fees” subject to Proposition 218. So, assuming that your Water District is a governmental agency and not just a private company like a Ditch Company from which you receive privately owned water because you have shares in it, Proposition 218 should apply. This leads to the second question: Does the amount of the fee exceed the cost of government to provide the service? This is a non-trivial question with lots of ambiguities associated with it, that are fundamentally accounting issues, regarding the level of generality at which you analyze it. At the most general level, the water district clearly isn't allowed to collect more in fees in the aggregate than is necessary for it to break even from purchasing the water from someone and conducting its operations (assuming that it is a governmental entity). But, assuming that this threshold is met, the question is then how much discretion the water district has to allocate its costs, many of which are fixed costs that benefit all of the people in the water district, to particular users. It sounds from the question as if some of its costs involve purchasing water from a wholesaler, and some involve things like distributing that water to individual customers, metering usage, invoicing customers and collecting payments. Also, another question of generality is over what time period costs have to match services. At a fairly broad level of generality, perhaps it is permissible to match fees to cost on an annual basis. Certainly, the matching doesn't have to be any more specific than for an individual billing cycle, but it isn't obvious that this much precision in timing is required. Almost certainly, the water district is entitled to some deference in how it decides to allocate costs to services when there is more than one reasonable way to do so. Very likely, the water district evaluated its billing policy with its municipal attorney in light of Proposition 218 when it adopted this system and obtained an opinion of counsel that its plan was compliant. Indeed, it probably has covenants in its municipal bond offerings that require it to do so. Therefore, it is very unlikely that the water district's billing policy blatantly and unambiguously violates Proposition 218, even though it make be pushing the envelope with a billing scheme that isn't clearly allowed or clearly forbidden by court precedents that are factually similar. If that is the case, you might find a lawyer willing to bring a class action lawsuit to test the validity of the billing system, but it would likely be a long and difficult case with an uncertain outcome that the water district is more likely to win than you are, although it still might be a technical violation. Given the small stakes you have in the question with your own relatively small water bill, and the high stakes that the water district has in justifying its billing system for all of its customers, it is hard to see how this would be an economic battle for you to fight.
They're not actually billing people different amounts because they have insurance or not. Doctors can pretty much bill a patient whatever they want for their service, similar to how a grocery store can charge whatever they want for their fresh deli cheese. Generally, they charge every single person the same amount. It just gets discounted depending on the insurance you have and how much they're willing to pay. One of the huge benefits of having medical insurance (outside of them paying for your medical expenses) is that they build contracts with service providers, known as their network. Those contracts specify prices (both preset and algorithmic) for certain services that you receive through those providers - the insurance provider will only pay that much and the doctor cannot charge the patient more than what is paid. If a claim was processed through a different insurance provider, the price will likely be different since each provider will have a separately negotiated contract with different price points for different services. It's not a system of "this is the insured price and this is the uninsured price" but rather a system of "this is the contract you established saying you'd accept this much from us for this service." For an uninsured person, though, you have no insurance provider and more importantly no provider contract backing you up. So you'd have to face the full force of the non-discounted price of those services. You'll face the same problem even with insurance if you go out-of-network, where the provider does not have contracts and therefore will only cover up to a certain amount that they would normally pay out for a similar service, requiring you to cover the rest of the amount of whatever the doctor decided to bill for that particular service. Without that insurance contract preventing the doctor from billing you the remainder of what they'd normally charge, you'll likely be slapped with a bill for that remainder. Directing back at your original question: there is no reason that a medical provider would ever legitimately bill someone a different amount because they are insured or not, thus there are no laws preventing it. It's that they already agreed to accept this certain amount from patients covered under this specific insurance. Again, they bill every patient the same amount - the insurance company is just saying "we're giving you this much and the rest of this, yeah that needs to go away." If you've ever looked at an EOB (Explanation of Benefits) from your insurance company, you'll see that the actual billed amount from the doctor is almost always much, much higher than what is actually paid out by you or the insurance, often known as the insurance discount. Maybe you'd rather think of it as a coupon?
While German law indeed requires providing correct contact information it does not require the recipient to answer queries. It is there so that you can submit legal notifications. In your case I wouldn't be so sure that the information is not correct. However, even if the contact information is incorrect, there is not much you can do about it. This is reserved to the following groups by § 8 Abs. 3 UWG: every competitor; associations with legal personality which exist for the promotion of commercial or of independent professional interests, so far as a considerable number of entrepreneurs belong thereto, and which distribute goods or services of the same or similar type on the same market, provided such associations are actually in a position, particularly in terms of their personnel, material and financial resources, to pursue the tasks, under their memoranda of association, of promoting commercial or independent professional interests, and so far as the contravention affects the interests of their members; qualified entities that prove that they are entered on the list of qualified entities pursuant to section 4 of the Injunctions Act or on the list of the Commission of the European Communities pursuant to Article 4 of Directive 98/27/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 May 1998 on injunctions for the protection of consumer interests (OJ Number L 166 page 51); Chambers of Industry and Commerce or Craft Chambers. Unless you are a competitor you are out of luck. The hoster or other providers can't do anything and don't need to, as they are not required to check legality of their user's websites. It doesn't really matter where you are by the way for these laws.
It would depend on your contract. Clearly, if I was selling timber and you ordered some with the agreement that I'll try to deliver at date X with no extra penalties, it would cost some amount. If we had a contract where I deliver at date X and pay for all your cost if the timber doesn't arrive at that date, then I'll either refuse to take the contract or charge you more. Maybe substantially more.
Is it legal in the US for a company that rents out car parking spaces, to bundle the renting of a parking space to buying insurance for the content of the parked car? Yes. Honestly, I'm a little surprised that I've never see this practice in real life. All things not prohibited are allowed, and there is nothing, per se illegal about bundling services and requiring them to be purchased as a package deal (there may be some licensing issues for insurance sales involved, but those would probably be easily overcome). Sometimes bundling gives rise to an anti-trust violation, but neither the parking lot operation business nor the car insurance business are so consolidated that this would fairly be viewed as some kind of anti-competitive practice.
Per GDPR Art 12(5), “any actions taken under Articles 15 to 22 and 34 shall be provided free of charge”. The right to rectification is Art 16 and reads in its entirety: The data subject shall have the right to obtain from the controller without undue delay the rectification of inaccurate personal data concerning him or her. Taking into account the purposes of the processing, the data subject shall have the right to have incomplete personal data completed, including by means of providing a supplementary statement. Thus, I think it would be invalid to charge a fee for an address change if that change was made in exercise of your data subject rights. If you didn't invoke this right, it's debatable whether charging a fee would be proper. On the one hand, they can charge whatever service they want (provided that this was part of the contract you entered). On the other hand, they have an obligation to assist you with your exercise of data subject rights. This includes recognising a data subject request even if you didn't explicitly invoke the specific GDPR article. For example, refusing a request for erasure just because you didn't invoke some magic GDPR words would be clearly noncompliant in my opinion. If the company offers multiple customer service options, charging for some of them may be all right. Typically, the lowest-cost solution for a company to deal with GDPR requests is to offer an online self-service option. An email to the data protection officer would typically also be free. Charging for phone support might be fine though. In an insurance context, there could also be a legitimate claim that updating your address is not a mere correction of your personal data, but a modification of the contract (depending on what you're insuring). Another possible counterpoint (which I think is not valid though) would be that the company never stored inaccurate data and therefore doesn't have to satisfy a rectification request.