How to Fill W-8BEN-E form(Rev. Oct 2021)? Guide 2023

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. IRS continues to revise the form W 8 BEN E form with latest version of October 2021 used by everyone 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 – Rev. October 2021)

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 screenshot..

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 individual 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 guide is based on someone filling it out as a corporate/ entity. We assume 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, the UK, and other countries.

You will need to follow similar steps for the individual. We will only discuss fields in the form that need filling. For anything that is not filled, we will ignore those fields.

Part 1 – Identification of Beneficial Owner 

• Field 1: You need to enter the name of the company
• Field 2: Enter the name of the country
• Field 4: Select the Corporation checkbox, 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(FFI) and NFFE stands for Non-Financial Foreign Entity(NFFE).
  • In general, for most of kinds of corporations or partnership firms, in our case, Private limited company, you should select Active NFFE, which stands for Active Non-Financial Foreign Entity(NFFE). If you are a financial institution, you probably would not be reading this blog article as you would already know this stuff 🙂
    • Active NFFE means any company that satisfies these two conditions.
      • The entity should get 50% or more revenue from active business transactions or services, 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. This means 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 a different mailing address use this field, otherwise 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 the below screenshot.

Part II – Disregarded Entity or Branch Receiving Payment.

In general, for most of the cases, there is no need to fill anything in this section. This is not applicable for most of the Private limited companies from India, the UK, etc.

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 IRS Tax Treaty Table 3. As we are filling this out as a private limited company from India, we should check for India. As you can see in the below screenshot, India is part of the Tax Treaty table from Jan 1, 1991.

• 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”.
  • We select this because more than 50% of the company, for which 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 ).
  • Also, the base erosion test means that companies engage in practices of moving their profits from one country to another country to reduce taxes. Assuming your company is not engaged in such activities, you should select this. It looks like in the below screenshot.

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

Part IV to Part XXIV

No need to fill anything in these sections as they’re not applicable for most of the companies like in our context of private limited company that is not a financial institution.

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

Part XXVI to Part XXIX

No need to fill anything in these sections as they’re not applicable for most of the companies like in our context of private limited company that is not a financial institution.

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 in the below screenshot:

The above guide valid for anyone filling out W-8BEN-E form in Year 2023, which is based on the latest October 2021 revision. This version is pretty similar to the previous Versions. 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 ?