EBay asking for national insurance number

[raik1performance]

Hi everyone, I recently joined for like 1 month and I start selling as a private seller , and now eBay is asking me to provide national insurance number.

"New UK digital sales reporting legislation requires sellers with 30 or more sales, or who have sales exceeding £1740 in a calendar year, to register this information"

[jckl1957]

No, that didn't happen although I did reply to another member - not you.  (It's not always about you.)

I am only responding to this post to suggest you don't make assumptions about a person's gender - I am not a 'bloke'.

[papso22]

Just to clear up the postage point, if it is charged to the buyer by the seller and then bought by the seller from a courier, it is an in and an out.

So it's 'income' and 'expenditure', and may be two different amounts.

If tax is due it's calculated on the net amount, income less expenditure,  i.e the profit.

[gibbsma]

yes. If you are paying HMRC right on your tax return then you should have nothing to worry about. I think ebay will freeze your account if you don't provide it.

[ravergamer]

Hackers took over the NHS and threatened to release all the massive gigabytes of data on the Dark Web at a ransom for money. NHS didn't pay up so the hackers released all data.

I'm very sure everyone's national insurance number are in the hands of scammers, thieves you name in. 

[ravergamer]

I keep seeing these ebay ads on tv etc. "It's now free to sell on ebay" they fail to mention about all this hmrc business. 

Imagine all the sales data given to hmrc from ebay and vinted. It must be in the millions. I can't imagine a small team investigating every seller. Surely they look at business sellers with high income. 

Looking at private sellers who have hit this threshold has to be a waste of time. Unless there's an automated system in place that triggers a response. 

I have surpassed this threshold and ebay have asked for my NI number. I sell items but it's never fir profit. I'm a huge gamer and I sell just to get rid, mostly selling off games for less than I originally paid for them. There's also sales on there from my 16 year old daughters games so she can have a bit of money for when she goes out. My brother had a bunch of old games on the loft and asked my to sell them. 

So are hmrc asking me to pay tax for this. It's a joke if they are. 

I mean these items have been taxed multiple times. Shop tax, import tax, manufacturers paying tax, profit tax the list goes on. Now the government want people who sell used goods privately to pay tax. Greed that what it is. 

Its no different than if I took my games to cex and when they give the cash, they take 20% from it to tax man. 

[lucy_farmer]

'So are hmrc asking me to pay tax for this'

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No, if you're selling your own and your family's own old stuff, they won't be asking you to pay tax.

If you make enough sales to get over the reporting limit, HMRC's computer will have a quick look at you to see if you match up with any of the 'identifiers' of people who are trading.

(computer will be looking for lots of Brand New things, lots of the same new things, lots of 'consumables',  listings that state 'choose your size/colour ' etc ...)

'Now the government want people who sell used goods privately to pay tax.'

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No they don't.

They're not going to say *no* to catching out people who are trading 'under the radar', but this wasn't solely

the UK govt. aim, or indeed, idea.

This whole 'handing over details to financial authorities' is a scheme put in place by the OECD.  Which is an organisation composed of most of the civilised western world's financial 'offialdom' (in the UK's case, that's HMRC)

The overt reason for it is to try and come down on online money-laundering. (the 'side effect' of getting a look into people's selling accounts is probably also very welcome...😎)

The fact that the limits seem such an odd amount of money and small amount of sales is because of there being so many different countries involved.

The £1750. limit is about 2000 euros (which is the most common currency in the OECD) and the small amount of actual sales is because there are a *few* countries involved who aren't quite so financially based and use more *things* than currency than we are used to....