A series of ab initio calculations designed to investigate the interaction of CO2 with acetate are presented. The lowest energy structure, AC-CO2-eta(2), is predicted by CCSD(T)/aVTZ to be bound by -10.6 kcal/mol. Six of the bound complexes have binding energies on the order of -8 kcal/mol, but analysis shows that the eta(1)-CT complex is fundamentally different from the others. The eta(1)-CT complex is characterized by geometric distortion, large polarization and induction effects and charge transfer whereas the other five complexes have little geometric distortion and negligible charge transfer. The amount of charge that is transferred from the anion to the CO2 in the eta(1)-CT complex is estimated to be about half an electron by NPA, DMA, CHELPG, and Mulliken analyses, whereas the EDA-ALMO-CTA (B3LYP) approach predicts a charge transfer of 75 me(-). However, the transfer of this small amount of charge leads to an energy lowering of -56 kcal/mol, without which the complex would not be bound. The RI-MP2 geometries closely approximate those resulting from the CCSD optimizations, and the optimized second-order opposite spin (O2) method performs well for all the complexes except for the,eta(1)-CT complex. DFT methods do not reproduce all the ab initio geometries, binding energies and/or energy ordering of these complexes although the range-separated hybrid meta-GGA (M11) and nonlocal (VV10 and vdwDF10) functionals are shown to yield results significantly better than other functionals considered for this system. The fact that there is such variation among DFT methods has implications for DFT-based ab initio molecular dynamics simulations and for the parametrization of classical force fields based on DFT calculations.