Had a bit of a situation crop-up today while paying some PAYG, and I'm looking for some advice:
Due to a miscalculation, I'd loaded the CC I was using with enough funds to cover the actual tax being charged to it, but not the CC surcharge (as most of you know, these are charged as two separate transactions). e.g., $1000 tax being paid on an Amex, meaning $1000 tax payment + $14.50 CC surcharge, and the card had $1005 available funds.
When the transaction was submitted via the ATO payment portal it returned a "payment declined" message. However, checking the card via online banking showed that the "tax payment" charge had been processed - it was too soon for the actual detail to show up, but following the previous example, the available funds on the card had dropped to $5.
We spoke to the ATO, who said they don't do any pre-authorisation of CC charges (and hence implying the tax payment really was charged, and not just authorised), but couldn't shed any light on what happens in this situation. Their suggestion was to call the card issuing bank, which I'm obviously not keen to do (and probably wouldn't help anything anyway).
Has anyone run into this issue before, and if so, can you shed any light on what will happen from here?