VO-BB - 20 YEARS OLD!

Foog

Have you ever had to fill out a W8 form? Do you just skip all the tax identifier number lines and just fill out your name and country of residence/citizenship? Argh! This is all so complicated!
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Andrew Fogarasi

Mike Harrison · Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2015 1:32 am Post subject:

Hi Andrew. Welcome to the United States of Bureaucracy. Smile

While I'm looking at it now, I've never seen the form before, but I found what are allegedly instructions for it. The title of the page contains "Instructions for the Requester of Forms...," and I'm understanding that to mean the entity who is requesting the form from you. However, if you read a little lower, under Recent Developments, it states: "Form W-8 Filers Should Read..." See if that is at all helpful:

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Form-W-8,-Certificate-of-Foreign-Status

If things are still unclear, try here:

http://www.irs.gov/uac/Tax-Law-Questions

Good luck!
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Mike
Male Voice Over Talent
I have taken leave of my sensors.

Simon Phillips · Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2015 6:05 am Post subject:

Hi Andrew,

I'm a Brit living in the UK and I send my US employers a W-8BEN if required. It seems to be the equivalent of the W8 for foreigners so I expect it's the one you'd want too.

Google W-8BEN and you should be able to download it as a pdf. You can check it's the right one for you and fill in the relevant information for your country. For example I use my British social security number as my tax identifier.

Once you've filled it in once you can keep the copy on file and send it to whoever needs it in the future. As long as you don't change address or some other important personal details, you don't need to fill it in again every time. At least that's my experience.

Foog · Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2015 7:29 am Post subject:

Thanks Mike and Simon.

It is indeed a W8BEN. Unfortunately (and not entirely unexpectedly), the IRS site is a morass of impenetrably dense accounting-legaleze. A great place to find the documents, but a rotten site to wade into if you actually want to know how to fill one of them out. Here there be dragons! And even though my first google attempts turned up nothing of any real use, a bit of more cleverly targeted google-fu led to a couple examples citing the appropriate Canadian tax treaty Article numbers for non-television royalties. How very tedious paperwork is! I've definitely saved my copy for future use. (at least this was in English. The Hungarian bureaucracy is downright Kafkaesque and I had to navigate it in my second language for ten years when I lived there. *shudder*)
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Andrew Fogarasi