What Is a UC Uncharged Refund Decline Code?

A UC decline code can be returned under the following circumstances:

Payment account has never been charged in your PayJunction account

This might happen when attempting to refund to the wrong card, or if the card has been reissued with a new account number since the original charge was made.

Refund amount exceeds total charge amount within the last 12 months

For example, refunding a customer $100 when the original charge was only $50. Charging a customer's Visa credit card $100 but issuing a $100 refund to their MasterCard is another example.

Refunding a credit card for more than you charged violates card association rules.

If you've yet to batch the day's transactions, please edit or void the original charge instead of issuing a refund.

These types of refunds expose your business to risk as a customer may dispute the charge to his Visa, and keep the refund to his MasterCard (thereby double dipping).

A significant number of typos are caught by preventing refunds of this nature.

If you need to issue a refund on a card that was not charged in the past, or more than the original charge, and you are receiving a UC error message, you may contact a PayJunction representative who may authorize a one-time exception (for example, merchants who have recently switched to PayJunction from a previous provider may still need to refund an older transaction). The following reasons for a UC decline cannot be overridden by a Payjunction representative:

Refund for charge(s) made within the last 2 weeks

This only applies to ACH transactions.

Because ACH transactions are not immediately authorized by the customer's bank PayJunction cannot be sure that the transaction will ultimately be accepted by the customer bank or if it will be rejected or "bounced".

Due to this, a common scam is to open a checking account, make a payment from the checking account, and then demanding a refund. When the refund has been processed by the merchant, the scammer then disputes the original charge to prevent the funds from being extracted while allowing the refund to go through, before emptying the account and walking away with the money.

To prevent this type of scam, PayJunction as well as other payment processors generally do not allow for refunds to an ACH account in close proximity to the original charge. If a merchant must make a refund within 2 weeks of the original charge, and is receiving the UC decline message, it is best to consider issuing a check that can itself be recalled in the event of a scam.

Refund to payment account number updated by a Notice of Change (NOC)

This only applies to ACH transactions.

A Notice of Change (or NOC, pronounced like "knock") is when a bank changes either the routing and/or account number for a checking or savings account used to make payments and issues the new information through the NACHA payment network. PayJunction automatically updates this information for you so that when recharging or refunding an ACH account the correct information is used. However, the UC decline message can still be received when manually entering the old, no longer valid account information.

Working around the above issue is as simple as either initiating the refund from the prior transaction, or obtaining and using the updated routing number and/or account number when manually keying the information into the PayJunction system.

NOC Code List:

Contact PayJunction support for further assistance if you still have questions about UC declines.