Back in February Linden Lab blogged about tax and identity requirements for Second Life :
As we’ve blogged about in the posts linked below, US law requires that institutions like Linden Lab collect documentation from Second Life users that meet certain transaction thresholds.
This was an update to provide people with further information regarding why they were being asked to provide identifying information to continue to be able to use Second Life. The initial requests had caused great confusion and although confusion still reigns, Linden Lab have provided more insight as to what’s happening and why. There are two important FAQ’s :
Linden Lab need to comply with these requirements to be able to allow financial transactions within Second Life to continue. Linden Lab can’t ignore these requirements, if they did nobody would be able to cash out from Second Life. Second Life would probably come crashing to its knees in those circumstances.
However a thread over at SLUniverse reveals that there are some new pains being created with these requirements, namely that the processing of these requests has slowed to a crawl and people are left scratching their heads regarding what’s going on. This thread is quite disappointing from a customer service point of view.
Second Life customers are complaining that there seems to be no movement in cases for over two weeks. Some people are reporting that after two or more weeks with no movement they then find that the only movement is that they are asked to send their ID in again because their scanned photo isn’t large enough.
One person reports that they submitted a ticket almost thirty days ago, a few days ago they received an apology for the delay, with high caseload being cited as a reason, but the case doesn’t seem to be any further forward.
Another user complains, and rightly so in my opinion, that :
Sitting on all my cashouts for weeks now. In the meantime they docked the Paypal processing fees from those very same cashouts.
That’s really not on to have a customer sitting there waiting for an update on their case and then to find that the processing fees for the cash out that hasn’t been processed have themselves been processed. I mean that’s really rubbing salt into the wounds here.
I don’t know what sort of software Linden Lab operate on their support system but it really shouldn’t be hard for them to inform customers that there is a high caseload with these cases, that processing these cases will take longer than usual. Whereas some people would still be upset and angry, at least people would have some feedback on their cases, many people are patient when they are kept informed.
Linden Lab absolutely have to gather this information, they have to comply with USA laws. However they also have a duty to their customers to keep them informed and a glance at the SLUniverse thread suggests Linden Lab could do a little bit more in the customer service department to address the concerns of their customers.
Due to a significant volume of payout request in recent weeks, payout requests may take longer to process than expected. We apologize for the delay, and we are working hard on clearing the backlog and process requests as quickly as possible. In the meantime, we advise residents to please address any specific questions through their Support cases. We appreciate the cooperation and patience from all residents, and hope to have payout request processing times back to normal soon.
Cheers Pete, that’s an excellent response.