E-gold demands to provide Personal Tax Identification Number

The proclamation of “A new beginning” made lots of people look at e-gold skeptically. The system that is a father of e-payment systems and the originator of the online transactions decided to show everybody its “purity and transparency”. However, it is known that the main part of e-gold users is those who don’t need any publicity, and this move of e-gold caused a wave of withdrawals from the system. Though some devoted users preferred to stay with their processor.

Last week Douglas Jackson came out with another announcement. Here is his statement: “As I noted in my post to this blog on July 21, 2008, e-gold Ltd. is working diligently to reach compliance with U.S. law and regulation as quickly as possible. As a major step towards implementing a more robust Customer Identification Program, effective September 18, 2008, e-gold account Users are now required to include a Personal Tax Identification Number (PTID) for the point of contact for any e-gold account they control in order to make outgoing Spends. For United States residents the PTID must be either their Social Security Number (SSN) or Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). Residents of other countries will need to provide their tax identifying number applicable to their country.

e-gold Ltd. remains highly committed to continuing to offer a cost effective Internet payment system making instantaneous settlement, free of chargeback risk, available to customers around the world. We continue to be confident that a regulated e-gold rebuilt to a more systematic specification will be less hospitable to criminals, and more attractive to mainstream business use without being less accessible to those disregarded by legacy payment systems”.

In other words, e-gold decided to be super transparent. Everybody knows that the whole database of e-gold is regularly checked by the governmental agencies and the PTIDs are just the last step of the stairway to US government office dealing with online transactions. Submission of those numbers will be the same if one goes to that office and tells about his or her activity.

By ECJ
9/19/2008