Hi, I'm the new person financially responsible for this studio's account- we changed over who handles taxes and receiving income due to management and LLC changes, and have been struggling for around a month now (starting May 9th) to actually have the changes go through and receive a payout. We've been trying to work with both Itch.io and TaxIdentity to make this happen, but the whole situation has been really distressing and confusing, and we still haven't received a payout or a reason why. To elaborate...
1) I retook the tax interview, and was let know within 24 hours by TaxIdentity that it didn't go through because our studio's new TIN (from making a new LLC) having issues- I retook the interview ASAP and realized it was likely because I had missed the checkbox saying tthat the TIN is under 30 days old. I fixed that and resubmitted.
2) I received no response from TaxIdentity on whether things had processed, and the status on Itch was set to pending. I tried multiple times to contact TaxIdentity, both through their main support ticket, their ZenDesk, their other email listed on Lilaham, and never received any response at all. I emailed Itch and they said that it was TaxIdentity's end, so I had no idea what to do.
3) On desperately looking for a solution for this, I found a button specifically on the tax interview retake page saying you could click it to scan for a completed interview. I did this, Itch now saying that the taxes had been validated. I was relieved, and messaged Itch to process the current payout. They had said previously: "Let us know when you’ve done this and we’ll expedite your payout for you at our earliest convenience.", so I expected the payout to take a few days tops, considering the use of expedited.
4) Itch.io responded with saying they got the tax info and that they'd validate it and process the payout. The tax status went back to "Pending Validation", and I waited to see what would happen. Since then, it's been 10 days and staff has not responded to follow up emails asking for clarification on what the process is and what's going on, as the whole thing has been very confusing and distressing for me while trying to handle newly managing the account. If the payout takes the usual 10-14 days to process, I'm completely fine with that, but the phrasing of "expedite" really confused me in comparison to how long it's taking, in addition to not receiving responses to what's going on, and asking if there's anything else I need to do to make this happen.
I'm completely fine with things taking time to process, even if it's the usual 10-14 days, but I don't understand what's going on based on the info provided by staff and I'm not receiving answers. That money in the payout was meant to go to members of our creative team in a crisis-tier living situation, and I really want to understand what's going on, even if it means waiting more. My support ticket is #211689, and I'd really appreciate some staff input on this so that I have something to tell the members of our team that this is meant to help- including if the process is just to wait.
Thank you.