Those twits at Paypal / eBay (I gather the former belongs to the latter now) have ended up accidentally paying us £923. And I'm having the devil's own job trying to convince THEM to TAKE BACK their money.
It's a long story - to summarise our eBay account got hacked. All of the victims of the scam have now been paid back, but eBay and/or Paypal have mistakenly paid our company "back" for some of the non-existent products fraudulently sold in our name.
We've rung up both eBay and Paypal many times, both about the initial account takeover and about the fallout. The staff you speak to are nice and helpful but all they do is pass it up to Paypal head office somewhere, who overnight send us annoying emails that are quite clearly written to a format and take no account of the actual situation. For instance they say "your claim" when we are not making a claim, quite the contrary.
It's unbelievably exhausting trying to track down anything in the confusing Paypal Account History statements, which have things that change the balance all jumbled in with "updates" that generally don't but sometimes do, and doubly exhausting when there is no reward to look forward to at the end of it.
OK, in among my ranting there are some actual bookkeeping questions here.
1) What is the double entry to go with the debit to the balance our Paypal account? This isn't a profit, nor is it a loan or a gift, and I assume one day they will reclaim the money, so we had better not start treating it as ours, quite apart from the obvious matter of honesty.
2) Can anyone suggest a Sage nominal code for the above?
3) What about VAT? I have to fill in my VAT form in the next few days, so this is the immediate question. I should stress that this a mistaken payment by eBay / Paypal, NOT a result of "purchases" from those individuals who fell victim to the scam. Is it VAT-able? If it is, is there any way I can say on the record that I want the VAT back when the money finally goes back?
4) More generally, what should I be doing to put on record with the taxman and anybody else relevant that we are NOT trying to keep hold of this money?
3. Would say outside the scope of VAT so no VAT issues
4. Dont need to say anything unless asked. Chances are taxman wont be bothered. Just keep copies of all correspondence/telephone calls to support the amount and what it is.
