I suggest those who are interested to follow up on the comment section of DoC's article.
For those who claim sign up bonuses are not subj to 1099, apparently if the sign up bonuses required tier spend to earn, it may very well be taxable!
Someone reported getting a $1000 1099 on his 100K Marriott credit card sign up bonus.
TorqReform#717339
I received a 1099-MISC for $1,000 for my Chase Marriott card. Outside of spend, I had the initial bonus (100k points) and one referral (10k points). Not sure how they determined $1,000 based on that.
That was what he earned, OUT OF SPEND. The Marriott pts are grossly overvalued at 0.01 per pt. Even AMEX does not have the insanity to overvalue the cobrand pts being the same as the Membership Reward pts.
Not to mention the $500 valuation fiasco on 500 bonus pts earned from signing up a paperless statement, that has shown on the 1099s received by those who got the 500 bonus pts.
Southwest airlines CC retention offers are also reported on 1099.
The worst part? people are getting Indian call center where the reps have absolutely NO CLUE on US Taxes, naturally. When people tried to reach higher level, they were told to call customer service number at the back of their cards!!!
Financial institutions make mistakes on 1099s every year, but virtually all of them, their support telephone lines are manned by US centers and not requiring impacted customers to jump thru hoops to get an amended 1099 issued.
In the comment section people are reporting spending HOURS talking to multitude of Indian reps without getting anywhere. Really pathetic.
At least DoC has tweeted Chase - probably the first time Chase finally learns about how messy this has become - all because of the outsourcing to clueless Indian software firm to handle the 1099's.