drexl

I prefer not to name this particular program. Instead I will give some general guidelines and good business practice for my EU affiliate colleagues. For my non-EU friends they can sherry pick from the below:

Intro
It’s not just about making $. We all should dedicate a certain amount of time to research, understand and make sure to know who we are doing business with.
It is your responsibility to take ownership of this, most account managers specialize in promo tools and traffic related questions . Furthermore, it is not their ass on the line, simply put: they don’t care (don't blame them, that's life).

Your are a business
It doesn’t matter if you are a guy making $200 / month or a Ltd company making $200k, if you are an affiliate marketer you are considered a business and your relationship with the company that runs the affiliate program is B2B.
You are the service provider (you are getting paid) and the company that runs the affiliate program is the business customer (they are paying you).

In the EU you must issue an invoice to your EU customers. More below.


Terms of Service (ToS)
Check that the ToS include the name and address of the company that runs the affiliate program. The name should be checked in the government company search (specific to the country of the company).
Red flag: the ToS only shows an affiliate program name and no company. Don’t sign up, you don’t know who they are and you don’t have the necessary info.
Red flag: the company name does not exist in the government company search. Don’t sign up.
Orange Flag: There is a company name but no address. You need the billing country to determine the place of supply and how are you going to verify the company exists in the gvt company search?

Tax ID
Noticed how affiliate programs asked you to verify your ID (ex: passport), enter your tax number (tin) or fill in a W8-BEN form? That’s because they are businesses and they are taking it seriously so should you : ask them for THEIR Tax ID : EIN or VAT number. It is annoying that they don’t volunteer that info. Beware of anything sent casually on Skype because of the "don’t care/don’t know" factor mentioned previously.
Once they gave you that ID, check for it in VIES* to make sure the name of the company matches the VAT number. If the name of the company doesn’t match but the number is valid it may be because the company is within a VAT group, in this case ask for the group cert.

*Check a VAT number with VIES: https://ec.europa.eu/taxation_custom...vat-validation

Invoices
Any EU business (you included) is required to issue an invoice. For example if you were a Spanish web designer who designed a website for a Portuguese company, you’d send the Portuguese company an invoice and they would pay you.

In the affiliate business the payments are sent even if you are not sending them an invoice but it doesn’t mean no invoice is required. What most EU companies who run aff programs do is generate a self-invoice. That’s an invoice issued to themselves (the business customer) and they send you (the service provider) a copy . There is no difference between a self-invoice and an invoice, it achieves the same result.

An invoice is not just a template found in Google and filled in casually by a traffic manager : for it to be valid it must include mandatory information and be generated as part of an existing billing system (the sequential numbering is going to be a large number, if you receive an invoice number of 1 you should ask questions…).
Ideally the invoice is sent prior to payment and by email as opposed to 2 weeks after payment and downloadable from an online dashboard.)

Note: a payout log, or stats dashboard, or even receipts aren’t invoices.
Here is what an EU invoice must include to be valid : https://taxation-customs.ec.europa.e...icing-rules_en

Bank or e-wallet Statements
Check your statements and verify that the name of the payout sender is the company who you have an agreement with. At this stage it should match the ToS, company name search and VIES.

Summary
If you are an affiliate of a program that emails you valid self-invoices in advance + the name of that company shows up on your statements and in the ToS + their VAT ID checks on VIES with the correct name and billing country : you’re good to go! Anything else, get to work, get the info you need or ditch them.