I’ve mentioned Inara Holmes before and today I receive news, via telegram of course, that she has helped to solve the mystery of the Second Life tax and account information forms. Inara was able to solve the mystery of whether people needed to put an Individual Tax Identification Number (ITIN) or an Employer Identification Number (EIN) on the forms sent by Linden Lab. The reason people were pondering this was because other companies require this information or those companies may withhold some income.
Inara, and her old buddy, Gray Of The Lab from San Francisco, have managed to clear matters up. Peter Gray responded to Inara’s query, again by telegram and Inara shared that information:
The users whom we have asked to submit the W8-BEN need only complete the fields in Part I, #1-5 (which does not require an EIN nor an ITIN).
We regret the confusion this form has recently caused for some users. To help avoid this confusion moving forward, we’ve uploaded a new version of the form that allows users to complete only the necessary fields and will update the messages sent to users when this information is requested.
So here’s the bottom line, as it currently stands, people do not need to worry about providing an EIN or ITIN for Second Life purposes. Whereas some people may frown about this and wonder why, the simple fact is that they are not currently required which makes filling out the form much easier for everyone.
Linden Lab will be updating the messages they send to people when they request this information and the form has been updated to reflect that six fields are mandatory, the field asking for an EIN or ITIN is not amongst those mandatory fields.
So for now it looks like this series of tax in the city is coming to an end, as well as Inara and Peter Gray, special mentions should could go to one of the main heroines of this story, Kat Fetisov of KCreations who has a series of excellent posts on this matter and telephoned the IRS, live, during episode one of this series!
Then there’s Jerry the commenter who provided additional background information and experience of going through the system and leaving the EIN/ITIN field blank. Jerry still came out with his funds, helping to confirm that the concerns people had, may not have been quite as taxing as they first feared.
Ideally, the Lab would put this information somewhere people could easily find it, maybe even retroactively update their blog posts or add something to the wiki. However at least the information is out and about.
Curtain call on this series, everyone take a bow, hopefully we won’t have to do an encore!
What would SL be without their excellent bloggers, we would all be lost and uninformed:)
Those commenting also add some much needed extra needed to the blog discussions too, your contributions on these posts were very much appreciated and helped to answer many concerns.