Starting from December 1, 24 states in the United States began to levy "e-commerce tax".
Last night, a large number of Amazon US sellers received an email. According to the email, Amazon requires sellers to submit tax information before December 31.
This morning, multiple Amazon seller groups were discussing an email with the subject line “Please update your tax identity information before December 31, 2018”:
The email said:
Your Form W-8BEN on file with Amazon will expire on December 31, 2018. To retain your selling privileges, please complete an updated tax audit no later than December 31, 2018. If you fail to fill in the information before this date, your sales privileges will be suspended.
To complete the tax interview, have your primary user complete the following in Seller Central. And provided the relevant link for sellers to fill in US tax information
At the same time, although some other sellers did not see the email, they saw an important notice when they entered the Seller Center: "Amazon needs you to provide tax identity information. To provide the required information, please click here to start a self-service tax review." Is this the rhythm of the US site requiring tax payment? This is also the seller’s first reaction after seeing the email.
Do many sellers receive tax audit emails? Which accounts are more likely to “win the prize”? The fact is, there are quite a few accounts that received the email, most of which are old Amazon accounts that have been in operation for a long time, and mainly corporate accounts; some individual sellers have not received the email yet.
What is the purpose of this email and how should sellers update relevant tax information? A seller analyzed that the arrival of this email at this time should be related to the registration time of the account. For example, the previous information has expired and the seller needs to update to the latest information. On this basis, the seller filled in the previous information and submitted it, and other sellers also completed the filling according to the company information of the registered account. A seller contacted customer service about this email and received the reply that "some states in the United States now require tax payment. Filling in new tax information is for buyers to pay taxes, not for collecting taxes from sellers."
As information spread, the email incident became clearer. Many sellers have received this email. Experienced sellers said that the relevant tax information should be filled out every three years. Coincidentally, many of the accounts that received the email this time had just been registered for three years. In other words, the purpose of this email is to notify sellers to update their tax information rather than to collect taxes. Sellers only need to provide relevant information as required.