Tax Compliance & Payout Readiness

Before Tournament Suite can send money to you — prize winnings, registration fee revenue, or any other disbursement — your account has to clear a compliance chain made up of three distinct checks: email verification, identity (KYC) verification, and tax documentation. Each check is independent and tracked separately, and payout release is blocked until all of them are satisfied. This page explains what each check does, why it exists, and how the platform surfaces your current status so you always know what's blocking you.

Why there are three separate checks

Payout readiness isn't a single switch — it's a chain of unrelated requirements, each satisfying a different obligation:

• Email verification confirms Tournament Suite can reach you at the address on file before any money changes hands.
• Identity (KYC) verification confirms you are who you say you are, using a third-party identity provider. This protects against fraud and satisfies anti-money-laundering obligations.
• Tax documentation satisfies tax-reporting requirements. The specific form depends on your country and entity type.

All three live on your account — not on any single tournament or project — because they represent facts about you as a payout recipient, not about a particular event.

Identity (KYC) verification

Identity verification is handled through a third-party verification provider and is tracked as its own status, separate from tax documentation. You start it from the payout onboarding wizard, which opens a hosted verification session; once you complete that session, the provider reports the result back to Tournament Suite and your verification status updates automatically — there's nothing further for you to do on your end unless the provider asks you to resubmit.

Until identity verification is complete, any endpoint that releases funds to you — including prize and escrow payouts — stays blocked, regardless of how far along your tax documentation is. The two checks don't substitute for each other.

Tax documentation

Tax documentation is the most involved of the three checks because the correct form depends on where you're a tax resident and, for organizations, whether you're registering as an individual or a business entity:

Tournament Suite determines which form applies to you automatically, based on your account's country and entity type, and the payout onboarding wizard asks you to complete the correct one — you don't need to figure out which form to file yourself.

What happens after you submit

Once you submit a tax document, it doesn't count as complete right away — it goes through a review before it's marked verified:

1. Submitted / pending review. Your document has been received and is awaiting compliance review. Payouts stay blocked while a document is in this state.
2. Verified. The document has been reviewed and accepted. This clears the tax-documentation blocker.
3. Rejected. The document didn't pass review. You'll see a specific rejection reason and need to submit a corrected document before payouts can proceed.
4. Expiring soon / expired. Tax documents carry an expiration date. As that date approaches, your account is flagged so you can renew before it lapses; once it expires, the blocker reactivates and payouts pause again until you submit a fresh document.

Recipients whose payouts exceed certain thresholds in a calendar year may also have a year-end tax form generated for them once it's available, reflecting the total amount paid and any withholding — this is handled automatically once your other tax documentation is on file.

Reading your readiness status

Your account has a single, combined readiness state that rolls up the identity and tax checks (email verification and payment method are tracked separately in the onboarding wizard itself). You'll typically see one of:

• Ready — no outstanding blockers; payouts can proceed once you actually have money owed to you.
• Action required — something needs your attention, such as a missing or rejected tax document.
• Pending review — you've submitted what's needed and it's waiting on compliance review; no action needed from you right now.
• Blocked — a blocker exists that isn't resolved by resubmitting on your own (for example, waiting on document review results).

The readiness banner

Whenever you have an outstanding requirement, a status banner appears at the top of both the Payout Setup page and your account's tax settings page. The banner lists each specific blocker — for example, "Tax document rejected" with the rejection reason, or "Tax document required" — and links directly to where you can resolve it. Each blocker also identifies who needs to act next: you, a compliance reviewer, or the system. If you don't see a banner, there's nothing currently blocking your payouts.

How this connects to prize payouts and escrow

This compliance chain sits upstream of everything else in the payout flow:

• Prize approval (see Prizes and payouts) can proceed independently of your compliance status — an organizer can review and approve your prize assignment even if your tax documentation isn't done yet. But the assignment won't advance to actual disbursement until you clear the chain.
• Escrow release (see Escrow) explicitly checks payout-tax-readiness for every winner before funds can be released. If you're a blocker, the tournament's release-readiness panel shows your name until you resolve it — this can hold up payment to every other winner in the same release if you don't act. A platform fee is deducted from the escrowed prize pool before disbursement regardless of your compliance status; it's applied once, at release, not per recipient.
• Escrow releases are also held back by a post-tournament dispute window — a fixed period after final standings are confirmed during which the tournament results can still be disputed. Release cannot happen until that window has elapsed, even if every recipient is fully compliance-ready.

In short: email verification, identity verification, and tax documentation must all be complete, the dispute window must have passed, and escrow (if used) must be funded — before a single payout actually reaches you.

What happens next

• Complete the outstanding steps from Payout setup — it's the same four-step wizard that covers email, payment method, tax documentation, and identity verification together.
• For how prize assignments are configured, reviewed, and approved ahead of payout, see Prizes and payouts.
• For how prize funds are held and released, including the platform fee and dispute window, see Escrow.
• To review all past disbursements, go to Financial overview.