Several legal issues also are causing confusion, said Bill Maurer, Professor and Director of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion at UC-Irvine in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Some states have laws forbidding rounding,” he said. “Second, federal law requires SNAP recipients to be treated the same as other customers; if a merchant starts rounding up or down for a cash customer but charges the exact price for a SNAP customer, they risk civil penalties and not being allowed to serve SNAP customers any more. There is a bill in Congress, The Common Cents Act, that initially provided provisions for rounding but those ended up getting edited out — and in any event, it’s still just sitting in Congress.”

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