Cook County says it has resolved some concerns related to sweetened-beverage purchases by food stamp recipients.

Retailers will now have to program their point-of-sale systems or manually override them so as not to charge the penny-per-ounce tax when someone uses food stamps, known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

If the tax is included in the selling price, retailers must have a way to deduct the tax when beverages are purchased by the food stamp recipients.

The change comes after the agriculture department objected to how the tax applied to purchases using SNAP and threatened to withhold around $87 million in food-stamp funds from Illinois.

In an email Thursday, Frank Shuftan, chief spokesman for Cook County Board President Toni Preckwinkle, said the county worked with U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Services to resolve the issues.

“The only change required was to strike the refund language previously included in the regulation addressing SNAP,” Shuftan said in the email.

Retailers should be given a credit for these tax exempt purchases and distributors can claim a deduction on their monthly sweetened beverage tax return for the amount of the credits provided to retailers.

Those who use food stamps for their purchases are exempt under the sweetened beverage tax ordinance, but the county allowed retailers to tax those point-of-sale systems. Refunds for those taxes, the agriculture department said, violated federal law.

In response to the change, Rob Karr, president and CEO of the Illinois Retail Merchants Association, said that the county has “little regard to the impact it will have on the retail community and its consumers.”

“Nine days after the county stated they wanted to move forward cooperatively and in good faith with the retail industry, the county announced a solution to how retailers should handle the sweetened beverage tax as it relates to SNAP, which essentially tells retailers they have to figure it out themselves,” Karr said. “Not only did the county refuse to recognize this issue from the very beginning, but it has continued to show little regard for the hurdles the retail community has to go through.”