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

My Amazon seller account got deactivated 5 months ago with no specified reason. Due to being busy with school and some health issues, I stopped selling this year and did not see this message. My account is now deleted, with "no way to access any information." All my tax documents, sale records and revenue info is gone. My fund is frozen with an appeal method that is ghosted (idk how much balance i have). Customer support told me to seek legal advise when doing tax return and wait for refund appeal

What can I do? I paid seller subscription which includes tax handling. Do I have a legal case to require them to send me my account data? Does Amazon actually delete account data in just 5 months?

edit: im willing to spend good effort and money to fight this corporate whim

The IRS won't care (much) but Amazon may have reported things to them, you can get copies of that from the IRS.

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.

There are state and federal laws that govern record retention. Amazon MUST have internal records due to these laws. You need to ask, citing these laws, and they should comply.

Before exerting a lot of effort/energy do a rough napkin-sketch calculation determine upper& lower bounds of tax burden / ramifications.

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

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.

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...