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Decided to bite the bullet and register for Managed Payments. First question is whether you’re registering as Private or Business, next one requires your SSN.
There’s no information on what ramifications (if any) if you register as a business account, nor on how they plan to protect my PPI. How easy is it going to be to hack eBay once someone finds out all our SSNs are stored on their servers? And there’s no opt out. It’s a required field.
I’m not feeling happy about this.
Opinions?
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eBay needs the SSN for reporting 1099 income to IRS. The only option is to register a business name or LLC, etc. and apply for an EIN then use that. It’s not eBay it’s the IRS requiring this, too many sellers flying under the radar on income taxes.
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It’s a little beyond that. The managed payments product is a money transmitter. I won’t get too into the weeds but in the US money transmitters have to comply with U.S. anti-money laundering regulations, including Customer Identification regulations. One regulation requires obtaining and verifying customer’s SSN. I don’t think you’ll be able to get around the requirement of providing your SSN by registering as a business because this regulation is in addition to IRS tax regulations. Almost every country has similar regulations. You probably provided your SSN at some point to Paypal unless you were grandfathered in many years ago. No one will be grandfathered into managed payments so expect to provide SSN at some point.
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I had to give my SSN to PayPal, so eBay would need it as well. I don’t file my taxes under the company EIN, so I have to give my SSN.
On the other hand, eBay should say how they protect your personal information. I can’t imagine that they don’t have that somewhere.
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With all the data breaches, I would assume my Social Security number is easy to find.
This one alone probably exposed most of our info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Equifax_data_breach
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@Jay right? I have been hit by every one I think, including Equifax. Target, Home Depot, our mortgage broker, you name it. We just got an email that some of our kids’ info was lifted from a program the school district uses. 🙁
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But doesn’t it strike anyone as odd that it’s a required field? What about foreign sellers and the Chinese? They don’t have SSNs!
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If they are doing business on Ebay’s U.S. website and thus accepting payments through a payments processing vendor that does business here (paypal, Adyen for ebay managed payments) than the Chinese sellers have either a SSN, an ITIN which is for all intents and purposes is a SSN in that it is a unique identifying number from the IRS, or in some cases, a foreign tax ID will work depending on certain circumstances. There’s no way around it. Companies like Paypal and Ayden (aka ebay managed payments) can get fined into the billions of dollars for violating the rules. Yes, that billions, with a B. I worked for the agency that wrote those rules and assessed the penalties for non-compliance.
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I’ve got a UTR (unique taxpayer reference) issued by HMRC, but whether the majority of UK eBayers have one, I don’t know. The equivalent of the SSN is the National Insurance number (NINO). The UTR is allocated when you do self-assessment (e.g. when self-employed or contracting) otherwise the NINO is used for Pay As You Earn (PAYE). That’s as I understand it- my comprehension might be imperfect.
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Coincidentally, I signed into the forum to ask the same question. As of 12/31/2019, I’m no longer running a business. We’re greatly downsizing and I’ve retired from Ebay. All I’m selling now is stuff from our house/closets.
I don’t want to give Ebay my SSN. My account is now an individual, rather than business. So, does everyone who signs up to sell something on Ebay after July have to give Ebay their SSN? Like random people who just want to sell a few things from their house?
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By law, they have to have your SSN for managed payments. They are complying with U.S. Anti-money laundering regulations, specifically the Bank Secrecy Act and more specifically the Customer Identification Program requirement. All financial institutions (which include services beyond just banks) are required to identify and verify the identity of their customers. Part of that process involves obtaining your SSN.
Ebay is also required to have systems to protect your personal information, such as your SSN (this is called PCI Compliance). Those systems are independently audited at least annually, but breaches certainly do happen but less so than in the past. Breaches are usually at businesses that were storing your information when they didn’t need to be (and thus were not being audited for PCI compliance) – they should have relied on only the financial services party to have that info.
Source: am an Anti-money Laundering Compliance Consultant when I’m not selling on ebay. 🙂 -
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