Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?

If it’s thousands, small claims court might be the way to go. It’s surprisingly effective, and also surprisingly painless.

For tens of thousands, hire a lawyer. I can help put you in touch with someone if you don’t know any.

If it’s hundreds, I’ll just Venmo it to you so you can mentally move on. Someone going to school and dealing with health issues shouldn’t have to also go through this.

I understand that companies need to fight fraud and ban accounts and whatnot. They're not always in the right, but they're certainly not always in the wrong either, and they're private companies so I can respect that it's their decision.

But we need legislation that can't be overridden by TOS that:

1) Forces companies (like PayPal or Amazon here) to transfer all remaining funds to you via check, unless they actually go to the trouble of suing you for the funds in court to prove they were stolen/fraudulent/illegal/etc. It's your money unless a court says otherwise, end of story

2) Forces companies to give you full read-only access to your account rather than ban access or delete info completely, so you can retrieve records and communications (like in this case)

A long time ago I would have thought the free market would have resulted in these outcomes anyways, but that's clearly not the case. So why don't we have legislators fighting for these common-sense solutions?

So, the next best thing you can do, is submit a best-faith declaration. I assume you still know how much you spent on source materials (in case you did physical sales), or approximately how many units at which price points you sold (for digital sales).

You then construct a Profit-and-Loss statement based on these best-faith assumptions, and go with that. It's quite unlikely the tax authorities will challenge you on this, unless Amazon happens to have communicated sales (and/or sales tax) amounts to them already.

If that is the case, and you best-faith declaration varies significantly from those reported amounts, you may face audits and/or fines. Prior to doing your tax filing, you may be able to obtain any pre-reported amounts from Amazon and/or the tax authorities: if you're going to spend any money on "fighting" this, I would invest it in a tax lawyer licensed in your jurisdiction to send the required requests.

However, also consider the monetary upside/downside of doing such. In many jurisdictions, fines for tax under-reporting are typically capped at 100% of the final tax amount. So, if you would owe, say US$ 5K according to your own calculations, and that actually turns out to be 10K, the maximum total damage (tax plus fine) you would realistically face would be around 20K. Then, see how much lawyering and anguish you would get for the difference...

You may be able to work it backwards from the bank statements, and make some assumptions.

Document everything, if you get audited (unlikely) they'll understand, as long as you aren't trying to pull a fast one.

Experienced Amazon Seller here. They always cite a reason for account termination, even if it's a ridiculous one, or one that's impossible to disprove ("we have reason to believe you are manipulating reviews of another account"). For non-fatal issues, Amazon often asks for a "Plan of Action" (POA) to have accounts reinstated.

You mentioned that you were out of action for 5 months. Did you check your notification history? Were you monitoring your seller metrics, FBM orders, feedback, and customer messages? If you don't respond to something like a customer message or a placed order that will definitely lead to problems up to and including account termination.

As for your specific issue - accessing tax records - seller forums indicate that you should still be able to log into the dashboard and access certain parts of the site. Can you do this? If so, have you attempted to file a support case for this issue?

Only take efforts that are quality to or lesser than the tax burden and/or the risk/cost of not filing anything altogether.