08-29-2016, 06:02 PM
quote:
Originally posted by KeaauRich
RJ,
Not to stir the pot any more than necessary, I believe Leilani's point was that even when the card issuer and the government officials/corporate officials agree which types of establishments should be blocked by the card issuer, sometimes the merchant code doesn't match to the card issuer's "blocked" database, so charges can slip through the card issuer's filter.
So even if the County prohibits purchasing food on the card and the card issuer blocks what would normally be considered food vendors, if the hostess bar's merchant code was something more obscure, the card issuer's software would allow the charge at the cash register even though it wasn't supposed to.
Since everyone here loves speculation so much, it's not out of the question to suppose that a hostess bar would try to protect its customers from embarrassment by obfuscating its true identity/reason d'etre on the credit card statement - or use an anonymous billing aggregator just like porn sites online do (...uh, um, like I'm told they do <looking around to see if anyone is buying it...>). In that case, no one (except the customer) would know what the charge really was unless they followed up with the card issuer for more detail.
Are you speculating that every time the Mayor made a personal purchase on the pCard it was because the vendor had the ability to alter the blocked (MCC) merchant code number?
And are you surmising that this is what happened in every case that involved an inappropriate personal purchase on the pCard?
I don't think this is possible the way the system is set up. Someone must corrupt it.
The pCard system works but there are people inside the system who try to work it and get over. Why are we paying the finance director, the managing director, the third party pCard administrator, and the supposed auditor if they can't detect a bicycle or a surfboard until now (or until Nancy Cook Lauer broke the story.)