So to be nice to people following my original account ( @lethn1 ) and to some this will either be horrific or enjoyable depending on how you find my viewpoints, I have decided to be organised and create a separate account for politics. I should be able to make more regular posts here because it will just be me doing political commentary on various topics and I think one of the first ones I'm going to be dealing with today is the IRS because I just recently had to deal with my first legal form for setting up credit/debit card payments for my games company.
I have signed up to avoid paypal's ridiculousness with a payment gateway called 2Checkout, amongst all the information I had to fill out, I had to deal with a form known as W-8BEN. To 2Checkout's credit, they made the process pretty easy and got everything set up for me so I just had to give personal details and check things off and I should be able to digitally sign it so that will get the process done fairly quickly. However, the fact is, I'm a British Citizen, I'm a startup and sole trader so I not only have no obligation to pay taxes to the IRS I don't even have the damn income yet I'm already being forced to fill out forms for them just because the company is based in the U.S.
I feel your pain Americans, to make matters more annoying, my income is going to get immediately converted to British Pounds anyway, really it seems this is just a way of them keeping tabs on currency that is leaving the country.
Here's some detailed and official information about it for those interested, if you do any kind of business in the U.S with a company you will need to fill it out if you are taking in any earnings.
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