Change a Participant's W-9 Tax Compliance Status for Advocate

Published on: Wed, 29 Nov, 2023 at 12:25 PM | Updated on: Tue, 16 Jan, 2024 at 3:04 AM

W-9 Compliance is an opt-in feature for Advocate that helps you and your participants remain compliant with US tax law.

After W-9 Compliance is set up, you'll need to indicate when participants provide you with their W-9 form. You can either update individual participant profiles or perform a bulk user import to update the statuses of multiple participants.

Update an individual participant's W-9 status

This feature is only accessible to specific impact.com editions or add-ons. Contact us to upgrade your account and get access!

Mark a W-9 form as collected

Marking a participant's W-9 form as collected exempts them from the $599.99 USD reward limit for current and future tax years. If the participant has rewards that are pending because a W-9 was missing, then these rewards will automatically become available.

From the left navigation menu, select Participants.
Search for and select the name of the participant whose tax compliance status you want to modify.
On the participant's profile, select the Tax Compliance tab.
Select Mark as collected.
Select Confirm.

Mark a W-9 form as not collected

By default, participants are assumed not to have provided a W-9 form. If you previously marked a W-9 form as collected and want to change the status, you can do so on the participant's profile.

Changing a participant's W-9 status from collected to not collected will not retroactively convert into a pending state any earned rewards that exceed $599.99 USD.

From the left navigation menu, select Participants.
Search for and select the name of the participant whose tax compliance status you want to modify.
On the participant's profile, select the Tax Compliance tab.
Select Mark as not collected.
Select Confirm.

Update multiple participants' W-9 statuses
This feature is only accessible to specific impact.com editions or add-ons. Contact us to upgrade your account and get access!

You can use a bulk user import to mark W-9 forms as collected for multiple participants. Marking a participant's W-9 form as collected exempts them from the $599.99 USD reward limit for current and future tax years. If the participant has rewards that are pending because a W-9 was missing, then these rewards will automatically become available.

Warning

This method can't be used to mark W-9 forms as not collected in bulk.

Download our sample .CSV file or sample .JSONL file.
To the sample file, add your participant data.
Add a column with the name dateUsTaxFormSubmitted.
For each participant whose W-9 you've collected, add the Unix time as a value for the dateUsTaxFormSubmitted field.
About Unix time
Unix time is also called epoch time. You can find converters online to translate conventional date and time notation into Unix time.
Follow the bulk import instructions to upload your file.

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