A Utah man has been charged with inappropriate behavior after he tried to pay a controversial 2,500-cent medical bill. The incident raises a legitimate question: Should companies take your money? “legal” allowed to reject any payment offer containing more than one hundred hundred cent coins (and probably could not “legally” refuse payment offered under any other form of legal tender). As with so many other things, he was completely wrong (and I knew that at the time), but I had no way of proving him wrong. But now I can. It only means that the Federal Reserve system must respect the entire U.S. currency. As the U.S. Treasury Department points out, there is nothing in the law that says private companies must accept it for all transactions. If a trader wants to sell his products in exchange for gold bars, nothing but coins minted before 1946, Swedish fish or Monopoly money, that is his right under the law. In other words, U.S.
currency and coins can be used for payments, but merchants don`t necessarily have to accept them for all types of business transactions. If a shoemaker wants to sell his products for 8000 gelled beans per pair, he has the right to do so; The buyer cannot demand that he accept the equivalent value in legal tender instead. However, legal tender is the method of late payment accepted in contractual agreements on debts and payments for goods or services, unless otherwise specified. The absence of such a law is how bus lines can legally refuse to accept your dollar bills, gas station employees can raise their noses to your $100, and handlers near the Monitor editorial office can yell at you after dropping a Sacagawea dollar coin in their cup, even if you just tried to be nice. But what about pennies? Thousands and thousands of cents? Apparently, the argument did not go in his direction. According to Vernal police, West asked if the clinic accepted money, then threw the 2,500 pfennigs on the counter and demanded that they count it. “The money was scattered on the counter and the floor,” the deputy police chief said. It is likely that the charge of inappropriate conduct had more to do with dumping and the scattering of pennies and less to do with the currency itself. But the incident raises a legitimate question: Should companies take your money? After all, a penny is legal tender. Doesn`t that mean they`re good everywhere? Conclusion: If a grumpy taxpayer drags a wheelbarrow full of pennies into your tax office, smile and offer him a seat. It could be there for a while. If getting paid in buckets of pennies is a real problem, you should put up a sign stating that the company does not accept more than a certain dollar amount in coins per transaction (just like the “no notes over $20” sign on the ledger).
While you may want to make this sale, you need to realize that accepting buckets of pennies could end up costing you more than what you earn from the sale. Most banks charge a high processing fee if the parts are not rolled, and paying an employee to roll the parts, even if they use an automatic machine, is still a time-consuming and therefore expensive process. In response to the decline in the value of the copper coin, some stores have stopped accepting it as a means of payment. In 2007, a New Yorker was so angry when a Chinese restaurant refused to charge him for dinner with 10 pfennigs (along with other species) that he persuaded a state senator to draft a law requiring money to be accepted anywhere and anytime. (The law was not passed.) And in 2009, a number of merchants in Concord, Massachusetts, banded together to protest pfennigs on Lincoln`s 200th birthday, no less. Origins: This is one of the misinformation that makes me wish that websites like this existed when I was a kid so I could report it to my dad and tell him to shut up. I don`t remember how many times he solemnly said that “pennies are not legal tender in quantities greater than 100” and that they were therefore merchants fortunately for private companies, there is no federal law that dictates what kind of currency a private company must accept. And according to one source, there are no states that have a general requirement that companies must accept cash or coins. Just as a company may refuse to accept large notes, it may also reject coins. Until the end of the 19th century, cent coins and nickel were not legal tender at all. The Coinage Acts of 1873 and 1879 gave them legal tender for debts of up to 25 cents, while the other scrap coins (pennies, quarters and half dollars) were legal tender for amounts up to $10.
This remained the law until the Coinage Act of 1965 established that all U.S. coins of any amount are legal tender. However, even in cases where legal tender has been agreed as a means of payment, private companies are free to indicate the forms of legal tender they will accept. If a store doesn`t want to take currency over 20 bills, or if it doesn`t want to take cents at all, or wants to be paid in just a few cents, it`s eligible to do so (but, as mentioned earlier, it must provide its payment policies before entering into transactions with buyers). Companies are free to accept or reject pennies at their own discretion. There is no law that coins are no longer considered legal tender if they are offered in quantities greater than a certain amount. Although federal law states that the documents are legal tender, it does not require anyone to accept them. If a company does not want to take money or a $100 bill, it has the right to refuse it. So why is the government keeping the money? The answer is simple: sales tax. Sales tax increases the price of an item to an unequal amount, so cents must be given in currency. Retailers need pennies to get back to customers, banks need pennies to give to retailers, and the Fed needs pennies to give to the bank.
Everything so that you can drop one on the sidewalk at the exit. Claim: U.S. law states that merchants must not accept more than 100 cents in payment. The only case in North Carolina I could find about trying to pay a local government in pennies is a case from 1921 in which a Durham water and sewage worker beat a customer who was trying to pay fifty cents for a $4.50 bill in cents. (Munick v. City of Durham, 181 N.C. 188 (1921)) Article 31 U.S.C.