A thread over at SLUniverse brings to light the issue that Linden Lab have apparently started to issue W9 Tax Information requests to certain customers. The information is patchy but evidence of the form is posted there.
The purpose of this request does not seem to be visible anywhere on the Second Life website, but information regarding the law can be found on the Paypal Website :
“Internal Revenue Code (IRC) Section 6050W states that all US payment processors, including PayPal, are required by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to provide information to the IRS about certain customers who receive payments for the sale of goods or services through PayPal. PayPal is required to report gross payments received for sellers who receive over $20,000 in gross payment volume AND over 200 separate payments in a calendar year.”
Linden Lab must therefore fall into the category of being a payment processor for the purposes of this law and it seems they are now requesting the required information, but there’s confusion as to when a customer crosses the threshold to fall into this category for Linden Lab to issue the request. Some people are reporting that the threshold is much lower than the requirements stipulated by the IRS.
If this is true, Linden Lab would not be the first company to do this, back in 2011 ecommercebytes reported that payment providers were lowballing IRS thresholds for 1099-K Reporting. In response to a seller’s question asking why Amazon had thresholds as low as 50 transactions instead or the required 200 Amazon said:
“The IRS requires that Amazon aggregates sales of sellers with multiple accounts, each of which alone may not meet the reporting threshold. Under IRS rules, the only way to definitively know whether accounts are owned by the same seller is to ask for tax identity information. Thus, we are doing everything we can to meet IRS requirements while still asking the fewest sellers necessary for their tax identity. We have crafted our policy with the help of our tax advisors and the IRS.”
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