Jules Jones

I'm doing my US tax return. I'm acting as agent for a couple of payments for a friend, because I have both a US bank account and a UK bank account, which makes it a lot easier for me to deal with small royalty cheques in either currency. This means I need to know how to handle those payments on my US tax return, and I knew I'd seen a quick summary of this topic on one of the agent blogs I follow. Pity I didn't bookmark it at the time.

A certain amount of Googling later, I found it on Pubrants:
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2008/01/god-bless-international-tax-attorneys.html

There are useful bits in the comments thread as well. Also some idiotic bits -- it's a blog with open comments. :-)

I'm looking at it from the perspective of someone who is already well ensconced in the US tax system, but it's also likely to be useful to Brits who are trying to work out which bits of paper they need and why if they're to avoid the 30% withholding tax on royalties from US publishers. For that, there's also an excellent blog post by Alex Beecroft on the Britwriters blog, Your ITIN and you.

(No, I am *not* willing to act as transfer agent for anyone else.)