Updated June 13, 2018 at 1 p.m.
Providing excellent customer experiences is core to our values at Intuit. Ensuring that customers have positive outcomes is as critical to our business as it is to theirs. Recently, we caused an inconvenience for one of our customers in the way we implemented our payment policy. We worked with that customer to resolve the issue and have made them whole for their inconvenience. We also invested time to learn more about their business so that we deliver a better experience for customers in the future.
Intuit as a company respects and abides by the laws in all the countries where we conduct business. As an American company, we respect the US Constitution and all the rights contained in it. Nothing about our payments policy, which has been covered in recent media reports, changes our commitment to this core principle of our company.
This specific issue is about long-standing financial safety policies in the electronic payments industry. The policies apply to payments received by companies in industries that are regulated by federal and state law, such as sales of pharmaceuticals, tobacco sales, pet sales, alcohol sales and firearms and weapons sales.
Our company does NOT prohibit ANY of these regulated industries — including the firearms industry — from using QuickBooks for payment processing. In fact, many do so today. However, for these transactions our bank partner requires them to be done face-to-face. To meet this requirement, our policy today requires the customer to be present to swipe their credit card. When transactions are “keyed in” by the vendor – including online and over the phone – Intuit cannot verify that the customer was present.
All of our customers agree to these terms when they sign on to use our services. When a customer of ours is unable or unwilling to meet this commitment, we reach out to them directly to explore a solution to the problem or to transition them off of our service.