It was recently reported on the personal finance blog Don’t Mess With Taxes – a credit card processing-related item was slipped into the Foreclosure Prevention Act of 2008.

Essentially it requires credit card processors to report the amount of payments they accept for each merchant on a 1099 form.  This will have two impacts: 1 . *slightly* increase costs for credit card processors (its just not that hard to generate that kind of form)  2. Merchants who are under-reporting their income to the IRS are more likely to get caught.

The IRS estimates this measure will help them recover $10billion / year of unpaid taxes.  It is a bit silly to sneak such a measure into an entirely unrelated bill, but the harm seems rather minimal, provided you aren’t one of the folks evading taxes.