Housing Bill Provision Rattles Privacy, Small Business Groups
Bill would require all electronically processed payments to be reported to the IRS, raising identity theft, financial issues for merchants.
"The issue of correctly matching the merchant TIN information leads to our second point, which is the difficulty of linking merchant payment transaction data to the TIN," she said.
Stubna said although its merchant processing business may collect merchants' Social Security numbers or tax identification numbers during the initial application process, the merchants are then assigned unique identification numbers, which are used to track merchant payment transactions.
"In short, our systems do not currently track merchant payment transaction data to TINs, and it will be extremely expensive and time consuming to reprogram our systems to comply with the new mandates," she said.
Stubna told the committee that the proposal would cause some merchants to go out of business because of the withholding penalty, cause merchant payment transaction data to be incorrectly reported and cause an increase in the cost of accepting electronic payments, harming consumers and merchants.
It was unclear when the Senate would vote on the housing bill.
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