Have your accountant send them a letter, and then if that doesn't work, pay a lawyer to send them a letter.
Not sure why you're downvoted, but yea, this is what you do.
Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
11–20 of 25 posts
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#12How much money do you think was in it? Are we talking hundreds, or thousands? 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 hea…
> If it’s hundreds, I’ll just Venmo it to you so you can mentally move on.
very classy.
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#13they'll send your 1099 at end of year.
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#14If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities. 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 s…
> If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities.
You can't get it anymore but Amazon may well have passed it on to the tax authorities. There also are the bank statements of the OP.
In no way is this an opportunity.
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#15I swear there needs to be legislation on this kind of thing.
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?
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#16If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities. 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 s…
There is probably only 0.1% Amazon actually, permanently deleted any tax documents this quickly, and 0.0% chance they did so without sending them to the appropriate tax authorities first.
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#17How much money do you think was in it? Are we talking hundreds, or thousands? 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 hea…
> If it’s hundreds, I’ll just Venmo it to you so you can mentally move on. very classy.
[retracted comment about assuming positive intent and comment proposal being a reasonable course of action, my apologies for interpreting sarcasm where it did not exist]
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#18As to the tax documents, you can always call the IRS. Being unable to get documents is a fairly common issue.
Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#19If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities. 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 s…
> If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities. You can't get it anymore but Amazon may well have passed it on to the tax authorities. There also are the bank statements of the OP. In no way is this an opportunity.
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Re: Ask HN: Amazon account is suspended and I lost all tax documents. What to do?
#20If your actual accounting information is truly and permanently gone, that's both a problem and an opportunity: you can't get it anymore, but neither can the tax authorities. 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 s…
There are legal obligations in most jurisdictions to maintain financial and taxation records for X amount of years, where typically X > 10, and severe fines for not complying with said laws.
While OP's account has been closed, this in no way means Amazon has got rid of these records. Their customer support is likely playing hardball since this is an atypical request with no escalation path.