“A new website designed for taxpayer identification (TIN) number validation for merchants who process credit cards. Starting January 1, 2013, new IRS regulations require TIN matching and validation.”
[ Newswire item picked up by Canada Business Review online ]
Capital Processing Network Creates Taxpayer ID Validation Site
Here’s the actual law authorising all this garbage:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/26/6050W
Hope this doesn’t apply to those of us using Canadian payments processors as well, though I’m sure Congress thinks their law should apply all over the world. (I’m using AlertPay for a few things despite the high fees … though most of our payments are coming from mobile app stores who handle all the processing themselves, rather than directly from customers giving us their credit card numbers.)
Does this have to do with reporting credit card payment inflows to the vendor’s TIN? Or does it seek to identify purchases with the TIN of the credit card holder? I guess I could understand for the vendor reporting, but if the system monitors customers it would be just another invasion of privacy (which already exists for credit card issuer-sponsored reporting of marketing data).
Umm…As somebody who has never worked in the US I have no idea what a TIN is. Is this something in addition to a SSN? I have that and I thought that that was all that I needed to renounce and file the 8854 and FBARs? Is a SSN a TIN? Would be grateful if somebody could decode the US government mumbo jumbo for me 🙂
As far as I know a TIN is a superset of SSN and corporate tax ID numbers. So if the vendor was a sole proprietor, he would use his SSN, and if he had a corporation, he would use his a corporate ID number. If a sole propietor is not incorporated, he has no limited liability and hence his SSN would be the tax ID number. Hope that helped.
A person’s SSN doubles as their TIN for IRS purposes. I thought so, but just checked on the IRS site to be sure … to interpret the IRS site, though, I found an easier-to-read explanation on Wikipedia.
@Jefferson Thomas
Many thanks for the quick response. I am dreading the new year more and more nowadays. Its almost like a doomsday of sorts- The end of the pre-FATCA (and thus pre-GATCA) era.