Tax forms
The affiliates near the US tax threshold view, the conservative $600 tracking threshold, and the year-end CSV export.
When you pay U.S. affiliates, you are the payer of record. Year-end 1099-NEC filing is handled by you and your accountant; Rekomi does not file anything with the IRS on your behalf. What Rekomi does is the tracking legwork: it watches each affiliate's year-to-date earnings, flags everyone who could plausibly need a 1099-NEC, and gives you a candidates CSV to hand to your accountant or e-filing tool.
How the underlying tax form is collected depends on the affiliate's payout method. Affiliates paid on Stripe Express provide their tax details to Stripe during Express onboarding (a W-9 for U.S. persons), and Stripe holds the form. Affiliates paid via PayPal (countries Stripe Express does not cover) upload their W-8 directly to Rekomi; their payouts are held until a current form is on file.
The Affiliates near the US tax threshold view
/dashboard/payouts/tax shows every affiliate whose year-to-date earnings, or payments, have crossed the $600 candidate threshold for the current tax year. The view and the CSV export cover the current tax year. Each row:
- Affiliate name + email
- Total earnings YTD
- Tax form status (a Missing badge, or the form type on file: W9, W8BEN, W8BENE)
The payout method and any tax conflicts appear in the CSV export.
The $600 threshold is deliberately conservative, not a statutory rule. The statutory 1099-NEC threshold for tax year 2026 onward is $2,000, but Rekomi surfaces candidates from $600 so nobody who might need a form slips through, and so brands filing under older or stricter standards are covered. Treat the list as a candidates worksheet: your accountant decides who actually gets a form.
W-9 vs W-8BEN vs W-8BEN-E
- W-9: U.S. persons and U.S. business entities. Provides the affiliate's TIN (SSN or EIN).
- W-8BEN: non-U.S. individuals. Certifies foreign status.
- W-8BEN-E: non-U.S. business entities. Same purpose as W-8BEN for legal entities.
For Stripe-rail affiliates, Stripe collects the form during Express onboarding. PayPal-rail affiliates are prompted to pick the right W-8 on /a/settings and upload a signed PDF plus a canvas e-signature.
Where tax forms are stored
Forms uploaded to Rekomi (the PayPal rail) live in private storage on DigitalOcean Spaces. (Stripe-rail forms are held by Stripe, not Rekomi.) The persisted URL is an opaque marker, never a directly-servable public URL. When you or an authorized admin requests a tax form via GET /api/me/tax-form (affiliate-side) or the appropriate brand-side endpoint, the server mints a short-lived pre-signed URL (5-minute TTL) and returns that. The SSN or ITIN on the form never travels through a public CDN path.
CSV export for your records
From /dashboard/payouts/tax, click Export CSV. The export covers the current tax year and downloads through your signed-in dashboard session, so it needs no extra authentication step. The CSV contains one row per candidate affiliate with these columns:
affiliate_id, email, full_name, tax_form_type, tax_form_status, year_to_date_cents, year_to_date_dollars, rail, latest_tax_form_type, tax_conflict, paid_ytd_cents
Deliberately absent: TINs, addresses, and payer details. The export is a candidates worksheet, not a filing file, so it never carries an SSN or EIN through your browser or a spreadsheet. Your accountant or e-filing provider pulls the TIN and address from the tax form itself (held by Stripe for Stripe-rail affiliates) at filing time.
Because you are the payer of record, filing the 1099-NECs is your responsibility; the CSV tells you who to consider filing for and how much you paid them.
CSV formula injection guard
The CSV export prefixes any field that starts with =, +, -, or @ (plus tab and carriage-return prefixes) with a single quote, so spreadsheet apps do not interpret them as formulas. This is a standard defense against CSV injection attacks where a malicious affiliate could embed a formula in their full_name that runs when you open the file. Safe by default.
Retention
Rekomi keeps uploaded tax forms for the seven-year retention window that applies to payer records (26 CFR 1.6001-1). A daily cleanup deletes a form only once it is more than seven years old and no longer needed: superseded forms (a newer form exists for the same affiliate) and forms belonging to anonymized affiliates. The stored file is removed first, then the record. The most recent form of an active affiliate is never deleted, even past seven years.
Affiliate-side tax form upload
The affiliate's view is at /a/settings. See Affiliates: Tax forms for what they see, how the canvas signature works, and what they can re-upload.