How to Fill latest W-8BEN-E form(Rev 2017)? Guide – Updated 2019

If you work with any US company as a blogger for affiliate revenue, or work with other players for any sort of revenue share, you will be asked to fill out details about your entity using the W-8BEN-E form. This is United States IRS Requirement and it is mandatory to have that. There was an older version of the W 8 BEN E form with Revision of February 2014, this has been updated and we have the latest revision now. You can see it on the top of the form. The below step by step guide is to fill out that latest version of the form.

Latest Version of the W 8 BEN E form – Revision 2017

You need to submit the latest version of the form. The easiest way to do that is to look at the IRS website at URL : https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-8-ben-e . You can verify the version of the form on the top of the form as well. Check below. Also, you need to have the right version of the form either corporate or individual. If you are doing it as an individual, you need to pick the individuals one and, if you are doing as corporate such as Private Limited, then you should choose the one that has Entities on it. Check below highlighted one.

Guide to fill each of the fields in W-8BEN-E Form as Entity or Private Company

The below form is to fill it out as a corporate/ entity. We are assuming the below as if you are filling it out as a private limited company. It is very common to have private limited companies in India, UK and other countries. You will need to follow similar steps for the individual. We will only talk about fields in the form that need to be filled. Anything that are not filled, we will ignore that fields.

Part 1 – Identification of Beneficial Owner 

• Field 1 : You just need to enter the name of the company
• Field 2 : Enter the name of the country
• Field 4 : Select Corporation, if it is a private limited company. If you fall into other categories, please select the same.
• Field 5 : This could be confusing. FFI stands for Foreign Financial Institution. In general for most of the kinds of corporations or partnership firms, in our case Private limited, you should select Active NFFE, it stands for Active Non-Financial Foreign Entity(NFFE). if you are a financial institution, you probably would not be reading this blog article 🙂
  • Active NFFE means any company that satisfies these two conditions.
    • The entity should get 50% or more revenue from active business transactions or services and not passive income sources. Passive sources include revenue streams like property rental, interest, etc.
    • The entity’s 50% or more assets should produce non-passive income. Meaning you cannot have assets like rental property assets over 50% of the company’s assets.
• Field 6 : Enter the full address
• Field 7: If you have different communicate address use this field, else ignore it.

Field 8 : You need to enter your relevant Tax ID here in your country here. for India, we should enter PAN Number of your company. In the past you had to have a US TIN Number, but no longer required. See below.

Part III – Claim of Tax Treaty Benefits

• Field 14a : You would check the box and enter the country name here, if your country is listed in the tax treaty table at : https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-utl/Tax_Treaty_Table_3.pdf. We have selected India, as India is part of the Tax Treaty.
• Field 14b : You will check the box here and then select the right sub category here. For the most part you will select “Company that meets the ownership and base erosion”. The reason we select this is if more than 50% of the company you are filling the W8BENE form’s ownership is owned by individuals or governments of the same country’s residents ( essentially foreign owners cannot have over 50% stake ). It looks like below.

That’s it, you skip everything in the middle and directly jump to part of Active NFFE

Part XXV Active NFFE

• Field 39 : Here you would select what you had done in the first section of field 5. It is the same thing as of Field 5, but now the details of the NFFE are given here. It is like below

Now you go to the last section to fill out the signature

Part XXX Certification

You need to have proper authorization to sign this as the MD, CEO, or CFO to sign this section. You need to enter singapore, name and date. It looks like below.

The above guide is for the latest 2017 revision is pretty similar to the previous Version of Feb 2014. You can read How to fill W-8BEN-E form Feb 2014 revision – India, Canada, Australia. You can also check the IRS website guide page, if you need more info

Did I miss anything ? Anything to add from your side ?