What should a freelancer fill out in W-8BEN?

Question

Freelance

One client outside of upwork asked for a W-9 for work that was ordered last year and paid for earlier this year. I have written to him so far that I am not a US taxpayer and I think he will ask for W-8BEN. I thought I'd download a PDF from Upwork - but it's not there. There, everything you fill out is your last name, first name, confirmation that you are not in the United States, and nothing more (even the country of residence is not indicated). While there are quite a few items on the W-8BEN form itself that Upwork, I believe, fills out for freelancers. Uh .. how to fill in all these points correctly so that you don’t get hit on the head? By default, as I understand it, 30% tax is charged, but if the form is filled out correctly, no.

Answer 1

do it as needed, no need to fool your head ahead of time
30% is royalties alimony and the like, can you even imagine if the upwork did not pay 30% only for this blank item?
there is nothing complicated there, there are even options in Russian https: //www.citibank.com/tts/sa/taxinitiatives/doc
...
https://www.bankglobus.ru/images/S_Docs/7_fatca_in...
the whole point is to indicate your tax data - address, TIN, it is difficult to make a mistake there

Answer 2

In general, someone may need.
The form itself can be found here: https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-8-ben
Under US law, you must send the form to the person who will pay you before it can be sent to you pay, at his request, otherwise it seems like you can be charged a 30% tax. (What happens if your payer doesn't ask for the form - I hz)
Depending on how you complete it, you will pay 0%, 30%, or some other tax. (I personally wouldn’t pay anything anyway, but it’s better when there are no complaints against you). And it depends largely on what you specify in the "Special rates and conditions" field located in Part 2.
I will not write anything about Part 1 - there are a lot of videos on how to fill in Part 1. I'll jump straight to Part 2.
To fill out Part 2, I went to this page https://www.irs.gov/businesses/international-busin... and downloaded a document signed back in 1992: https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs -trty/russia.pdf (if you are not from Russia, for example, from Belarus, Kazakhstan, or Ukraine, then the link to the document will be different, and taxes, perhaps, too, the list of links to documents is higher).
In this document, I found that what I do is the 13th article (Independent personal services). And this article has the 1st paragraph, which exempts me from paying US taxes. For another country, the article and paragraph number may be different, and not necessarily with a zero rate.
Having found all this, I filled in the Special rates and conditions field with the following content:
The beneficial owner is claiming the provisions of Article and paragraph 13(1)
of the treaty identified on line 9 above to claim a 0 % rate of withholding on (specify type of income): Independent personal services . For you, what I have highlighted in bold will be different, depending on which country of residence you have and which article with the paragraph suits you.
Line 9 in the 2021 edition indicates the country of residence (in another edition, the line number may be different), and for the same country, a little higher in the text, I was looking for reasons not to pay taxes in the United States.
I would like to ask - if I put a bolt on all this, will the US tax authorities somehow get me somewhere? I didn’t put the bolt in, but I spent a decent amount of time.

Answer 3

There are always options:
1. Pay for services to someone who fills out this form for you.
2. Fill in yourself or google filling examples. If the problem is with English, then find the Russian version.