Senate Business, Labor, & Technology

Will call to order the Senate Business, labor and Technology Committee. Ms. Chapman, please call the roll. Senator Catlin? Here. Judah Liston? Here. Linstedt? Present. Madam Chair? Here. Okay. Welcome folks. We have one item on the agenda today. Senate Bill 134. When the sponsors are ready, please come to the table and tell us about your measure. Senator JUDAH thank you, Madam Chair and members of the committee. Senate Bill 134 addresses a simple question of fairness. Should businesses be charged credit card swipe fees on money that was never theirs to begin with? When a merchant collects sales tax, they are acting as the state's collector. Yet under the current system, card networks and issuing banks take a percentage based fee on that tax amount as if it were part of the merchant's revenue. This legislation simply says taxes should not be subject to interchange fees. To understand the scale of this issue, consider this. In 2024 alone, Colorado businesses paid more than $217 million in swipe fees just on the sales tax portion of the transaction money that never belonged to them in the first place. For many businesses, swipe fees have quietly become one of the…