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by danpat 4715 days ago
For the US, IRS publications 515 and 519 clarify all that stuff. The IRS wants to tax "US Source Income", there are various criteria that define it. For goods sold from overseas and shipped to the US, it call comes down to "where it is sold", which is at the discretion of the seller. It can be at the customers end if that's convenient for you (but it rarely is).

I worked for a Canadian company that sold niche hardware primarily into the US market. We were based entirely in Canada and just shipped to the US using UPS.

We regularly had to convince US business buyers that they didn't need a W-9 from us, nor did they need to withhold taxes.

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For the US, IRS publications 515 and 519 clarify all that stuff. The IRS wants to tax "US Source Income", there are various criteria that define it.

Are we back to talking about sales or other revenue-based tax here? The major dispute we were originally talking about in this HN discussion was to do with where profits are declared and corporation tax or the equivalent is paid; I only mentioned the sales/VAT angle as an example of how easily tax rules can get complicated when you have to decide where some intangible thing happened.