This is insanity. It's not just the money taken in taxes, it's the fact that you additionally have to deal with the additional administrative overhead of filling out US tax paperwork, praying you don't get it wrong or paying a US-focused advisor to do it for you.
I am not sure, at least it is the same on Amazon KDP. There are three situations as summarized in the above link:
* Creator doesn’t submit tax info.
* Creator submits tax info and claims a treaty benefit.
* Creator submits tax info, but is not eligible for a tax treaty.
You have to pay your taxes somewhere, if you don't tell Google that you pay them in your country, then Google is in charge to collect the taxes at least for the part concerning US users.
As an individual yes but i’m not aware of companies having this problem. Does Google treats all its creators as people (i.e income tax) only or does it have the ability to recognise companies?
I guess i can close this with the disbelief that content creators setup companies and then use Youtube as themselves. What kind of accounting shenanigans would be required to be a company and content creator on youtube? I am genuinely interested.
This feels like a really bad deal for non Americans. From Intuit Canada:
> If taxes were deducted from your income, you can claim those taxes as if you paid them to the CRA. Because you have a duty to report all your U.S. income on your Canadian return, the income is deemed taxable as Canadian income. The usually lower U.S. income tax rate could leave you with an amount owing for the difference between the United States and Canadian income tax rates.
So Canadians pay (some) income tax to the US instead of Canada and the US gives us nothing in return? It feels like those are systems that were put in place with the assumption that earning income in the US would require the use of US resources (ie: living in the US).
That’s just a flat out bad deal for Canada and Canadians, right?
>So Canadians pay (some) income tax to the US instead of Canada and the US gives us nothing in return?
that's only from your perspective, right? All of this is negotiated as part of a tax treaty so I'd presume that they figured the tax flows are roughly equal (eg. how the UPU works), or they have a specific process to settle the difference.
Seems like the US didn’t enforce antitrust laws and allowed YouTube to grow into a monstrous monopoly, because they wanted Internet revenues to all flow into America rather than into a variety of companies, some of which might end up not being American if YouTube was split up. Seems like a pretty bad deal for literally everyone.
I think the damage to democracy is done by low interest rates (QE). US was lucky to not be affected by wars and hate for a long time, but they existed before tech companies, like Facebook, especially when the financial system was centralized and corrupt.
> U.S.–U.S.S.R. income tax treaty. The U.S.–U.S.S.R. income tax treaty remains in effect for the following members of the Commonwealth of Independent States: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. That treaty will remain in effect until new treaties with these individual countries are negotiated and ratified. Provisions of the U.S.–U.S.S.R. income tax treaty are discussed in this publication under Commonwealth of Independent States.
At first this sounds crazy but the article makes it clearer that really they're talking about taxing revenue earned in the US from US viewers.
That's not quite so unreasonable as long as it's reciprocated for US creators operating in foreign markets. i.e. you pay taxes where the viewers are, not (only) where the creator is.
If you don't submit any tax details they'll go after your full world wide revenue as they don't know where it was earned, so it will be important to do that.
I guess it could all be avoided if YouTube added a feature to allow creators from the rest of the world hide content from US viewers but that's probably not part of their business plan.
It's actually not that difficult. Yes you do not want to make any mistakes ($1000 fines) but there are companies who will sort this out.
There are plenty of people, myself included who live outside the US and get paid from US earnings with no tax deductions in the US. It helps of course if your country has a withholding treaty like the UK does with the US.