Cannot have two ebay accounts with same EIN - problem

[ethnos360_aviation]

The company I work for has 3500+ employees in 5 states with several distinct departments.  Although our department has been selling extra equipment on ebay for 4+ years, today I received an email from ebay asking me to update my identification.  It wanted the company EIN, which is like a SSN for a company.  When I put the company EIN number into the "Update Account" webpage, it auto-populates with information from a different department in a different state of the our same company.  Not good.  We buy and sell on ebay often independent of the other departments.  I'm sure this is not unique to my employer.  After a lengthy chat session and a phone call, it was determined that ebay does not have the ability to have multiple accounts under the same EIN.  The gentleman on the phone suggested I should use my own SSN and bank account when selling for ebay.  Now that ebay reports financials to the IRS, this could be a real nightmare for my personal book keeping.   Imagine if all of Ford Motor Company or General Electric were forced to use one shared ebay account. 

Ebay - PLEASE ALLOW MULTIPLE ACCOUNTS UNDER THE SAME EIN!

If, by chance, the info I received via the chat and phone call were wrong and there is a way to do so, please contact me ASAP. 

[shipscript · Accepted solution]

There is something wrong with this picture because a seller can have a multitude of selling accounts under the same SSN, so a corporation should also support multiple selling accounts under one EIN.

The problem appears to be with the department that first opened the account. Does the IRS receive tax returns from different departments? If not, that department may not have correctly entered their tax information. Only the corporate tax return info should appear in the registration data. There can then be different departments (or DBAs) with different contact information.

I have a corporation with one EIN and two eBay selling accounts. The contact email, primary contact, and shipping and return addresses differ between the two; while the business name, EIN, and physical (KYC) business address are the same on both to match a bank account. One point here is that the IRS needs only our PO Box, whereas KYC banking laws want a physical address. I suspect both of your company departments will need to use the same HQ physical address where taxes are paid. You can then diverge with the phone number, ship from, ship to, and return addresses. The wildcard here is if your bank account is tied to your local physical address rather than the corporate physical address (KYC - know your customer - issues).

I think your department may need to communicate with that other department to clarify where the 1099 is supposed to be sent, matching what the corporation is doing with taxes.

[ethnos360_aviation]

Thank you Shipscript. 

This information is helpful and I will make further attempts at working with ebay accounts to sort this out. It is good to know it is possible to have more than one ebay account using the same EIN.