When investing on Wefunder, you need to provide a tax ID to invest. Tax ID generally means an SSN for an individual and an EIN for a company. We require these because when the company you invest in makes a distribution to investors (for example, if they get acquired), we’ll need to provide tax documents to you, such as a Form K-1, which requires us to include your SSN. If we don't receive your SSN, your investment will be canceled.
We know you might be hesitant to provide this information, but we guard your SSN like our life depends on it.
We encrypt and store Social Security Numbers (SSNs) on a separate group of servers from wefunder.com. We use an RSA key to encrypt the SSN and isolate the private key from production machines. Access to the database storing encrypted SSNs is restricted within Wefunder on a need-to-know basis. We have a policy for access if and when an employee may need to view an individual's SSNs (for example, if we're preparing a tax filing or investigating fraud).