Originally Posted by
beachmouse
It's a change in the taxable income reporting law tied to one of the covid relief bills- the threshold for 'must report income to the IRS' went from something like $20K to $600. It's also going to impact a lot of small sellers on ebay, etsy and such.
To this point, I've claimed whatever ended up in my PayPal account from the GPT programs as income but haven't done anything with what I've redeemed for miles or hotel points because it seemed like the IRS didn't consider those to be income. Guess that might be changing.
Shopping rebates are not taxable income, though -- they are essentially just a discount. One exception would be if you are getting a rebate against something you used as a tax deduction, such as business expenses. But mypoints and other shopping portals have no way of knowing if that is the case. So I guess they are being overly cautious.