We're a Canadian company. Paypal put a limitation on our account (we cannot access our funds) until we provide confirmation of identity. I'm a third party (manage online website and its sales on behalf of my parents/owners on the side of my day job hence why the Paypal is under my account). We've been having a difficult experience trying to confirm our bussiness identity. I've been asked to provide paypal my personal SIN. I've uploaded an Ontario master business license and shareholder certificates showing my parents hold 100% of the company (in all tranparency, mind you, that I had initially uploaded an expired master business license but they even rejected the updated/new license and email from Ontario government, which contains the license number). I entered director information into their form and then Paypal asked me to provide it again. Paypal's online form doesn't allow for the upload of several documents so the agent I spoke to on the phone said to upload them via the message centre and also to have the owners write a letter on our official letterhead confirming the structure of the company, including reference to my role as a third party. The message centre rep then said they cannot accept documents via the message centre and to add them to the resolution centre but I cannot upload the documents there because I do not have a case open. The phone rep said that a new law has passed that requires us here in Canada to report all this information. They do not seem to recognize official documents as I would think that a master business license, which includes our business license number, business name registration number, and incorporated number, plus shareholder certificates should suffice. My dad has started to question whether I have been scammed? Whereas I am ready to remove Paypal from our website and depend on our alternate payment gateway on our site - Canadian-based Bambora - my mom wants to continue to use PayPal because of customers' familiarity with the gateway, otherwise I would have walked away by now. Does anyone know what law requires us to share SINs and other extensive business details for and/or with the U.S. government? Where is this information being stored? Is it linked to other source records? I'm an information professional by trade and teach a graduate privacy course. It appears that they are requesting more information than what is needed by our own Canadian government. The amount of information and the fact that PayPal is not being transparent about which laws this applies to in their request and the privacy and data management specifics including purposes of use related to our personal and sensitive data is a major red flag. I was thinking of filing a BBB complaint as I find the hijacking of our funds to obtain information as coercive - (a form of manufacturing our consent to personal information when other means could have been employed) and, I suspect in looking at the limited number of similar complaints, the inconsistent level of detail required and scrutiny of our black-owned business (and me personally as a black third party to which this information is publically available via a basic Google search) as potentially discriminatory. As such, I asked my sister, a Canadian chartered public accountant, to communicate on behalf of my parents and myself from now on to ensure the request for information is legitimate and fair. Is every Canadian business being required to provide the same level of detail of information? What documents have you been asked to provide to Paypal? Did you receive notification that your account would have a limitation put in place before they requested information? When were you asked to provide this information to them -did this law come into effect for all businesses at the same time for all businesses.
