We held a webinar several weeks ago on the subject of card payment reporting by Merchant banks. The IRS has finally provided us with additional information with the IR-2009-106 (full reference to be found here). In general, the proposed regulations do what we figured they would and provide guidelines regarding the mandatory reporting of payments made to merchants by third parties. Most importantly, they have cleaned up some of the confusing references to payment intermediaries and clearly defined who is responsible for what.

Recently the IRS offered clarification on some of the rules around TIN Masking. Whatever tax reporting solution you are using or thinking about using needs to be sure to properly handle the exceptions described here.