Providing a SS# to a person employing you is not considered self incrimination.
Providing a SS# to a person employing you is not considered self incrimination.
He can do whatever he wants, and I'm telling him why he shouldn't. Had he asked about these surveys before he took the first one, I'd have said, "don't do it." This is no longer an issue of breaking the law anymore.
Each week that he reported no earnings, he made a false statement. Those carry a minimum of 5 weeks of forgone benefits. Not where they defer your checks, but checks that you claimed and were deducted from your overall claim balance that you'll never see.
Each time he took a survey and completed it that should have created a separation issue and a new adjudication.
It would be a real stretch to call this research group his employer, and if they really considered him an employee, they'd have had him fill out an I-9 and state and federal withholding forms before paying him a nickle. If he doesn't want to provide them with his SS#, the "employer" can pursue some other avenue to get it, but if he doesn't want to help them, they can't make him.
So, your position is that having broken the law already, and now being offered with a way he could extricate himself from and legal issues and not having to wait for the shoe to drop when the UI catches up with him, he should ignore it and keep waiting for the shoe?
By your logic a shoplifter can absolve themselves of the crime by paying for the merchandise.
He might get lucky and walk away with a slap on the wrists, but he might not and the penalties are steep, and with 1099 income there is the selfemployment issue that can cut you off.
You can't know that he can "extricate" himself from this. This isn't like the more typical stuff I see. He didn't mistate his income because he couldn't forecast his commission income to the penny or that he's one of the people that report net income rather than gross.
when i say i got paid to do some research groups, i mean that i was a participant in them. i did a couple throughout the year and got paid maybe a couple hundred at most for all of them. From day one they never told me they need or will need my ss# nor did they have me or tell me that i will have to fill out a 1099 form later or a w9 form. Had i known that I would have not continued to participate in the research groups. I talked to a CPA earlier today and he said that its not 100% certain that they wouldnt find something but that if they dont have and never asked for my SS# and never filled out a 1099 or a W9 then they would have nothing to tie me to doing the research groups.
Not the same thing. The employer, rightly or wrongly, is treating him as a contractor. They may be right, they may be wrong, but they are acting under that belief. They paid him, and they now wish to make the appropriate reports to the appropriate agencies. They quite rightly contacted him for his SSN, which they have every right to ask for, and they are asking for it at the time when an employer would normally ask for it. In other words, from their perspective, it's just another day in paradise.
If the OP fails to respond, they're unlikely to let it drop. Since they're not trying to hide anything, they'll notify the IRS that they have been unable to obtain an SSN but here are the rest of the particulars on this individual. The IRS will know what to do with it. The worst thing that can happen to the employer is that they *might* say, Oh, btw, you should have treated him as an employee. Here's a slap on the wrist - do it right next time.
If the poster responds now, and self-reports his error to the UI, the UI is unlikely to do anything more than say, Okay, you owe us back for x amount - how do you want to pay it? But if they find out through the IRS that the poster did not report these earnings, they're going to take a much harder line. As will the IRS.
This is not entirely correct. If a payor believes that they will need to issue a 1099 to a payee it is their obligation to require the person to fill out a W-9 before any work is done or any payment is made. They have no enforceable authority to demand such after the fact.
In addition, self employment tax only applies to self employment income/profit above 400.00, and a payor is not required to issue a 1099 to anyone unless they paid that person more than 600.00 in a calendar year.
Therefore, it would be quite odd for a payor to attempt to demand info, after the fact, for someone that they paid less than 600.00 in a calendar year. I could see them attempting to do so if they almost never pay anyone more than 600.00 but incidentally had one person that they paid more than 600.00, but at the same time, they have no enforceable right to demand that the payee provide a W-9 after the fact.
I'll grant that they should have obtained the information prior to the work being done. Plain fact is, however, lots of employers don't. Does that make it right? No, but it makes it common.
Since we don't know how much the poster was paid, we don't really know if they need to issue a 1099 or not, do we?
And I still maintain that even if the employer is wrong about what he is doing and how he is going about it, the fact remains that if they're trying to file the tax forms at all, it's unlikely that they will just drop it altogether if the poster refuses to cooperate.