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I got conflicting information from Stripe and RBC support and I was trying to use the RBC USD branch information which is what I use to withdraw USD from PayPal. Stripe needs the Canadian branch information and also note it only wants 7 digit number as the bank account number.

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I entered it with the 06222- prefix and they accepted that but it was causing payments to fail. I switched to trying US branch information (like PayPal) and that wasn't working. Ended up just needing to use Canadian branch (even for USD) and entering number the way they expect.

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They don't validate that you enter it in the right format because it's a US-centric company and they don't seem to understand how Canada works. It does work properly and painlessly if you enter the information the way they want, at least with RBC. Can't speak to other banks.

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Yeah, not with RBC. All of that and the IRS forms they want to be filled out honestly just makes anxious. Perhaps someday, but for now I'll stick with PayPal.

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W8-BEN is easy to deal with as a Canadian because we have a tax treaty with the US allowing you to simply put 0% withholding tax with a standard reference to a tax treaty article. It's ridiculous you actually need to cite right part of the tax treaty but you can find it online.

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I've had to fill out several of them at this point because companies treat bug bounties as contract income. Google let me sign a standard statement of no US activities form instead but later I figured out it was pretty easy to deal with the W8-BEN nonsense as a Canadian anyway.

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It could be super painful in other countries because you can end up needing to let IRS take up to 30% withholding tax and then you actually have to file a US tax return to get the money back. As a Canadian, it's just a hassle to know secret password of tax treaty article to cite.

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This is up-to-date information: michellecornish.com/blog/how-to-fi You just need to put "business income" as the type of income instead of "royalties" with the same Article VII cited for 0% income and the same explanation that you carried out no US activities as part of getting it.

michellecornish.com

How to Fill Out a W-8BEN Form as a Canadian Author — Michelle Cornish - Canadian Author Illustrator

As someone who worked as a tax accountant for almost twenty years and earned a Chartered Professional Accountant designation, I found this form confusing when I first had to fill it out for one of my...

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Also, CRA recognizes that crowdfunding income is not taxable income if you aren't providing a service or product to people so you don't actually need to pay taxes on it if you aren't giving people shirts or something else the CRA could claim has actual tangible value to them.

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taxpage.com/articles-and-t is the general idea. Basically, if you give rewards, you turn it into taxable income. There's ridiculously complex information about it on the CRA site. I talked about it with an accountant and they recommended being really careful not to offer anything.

Canadian Taxation of Crowdfunding - TaxPage.com

Canadian Taxation of Crowdfunding—A Canadian Tax Lawyer Analysis What is Crowdfunding? As the name suggests, crowdfunding is a manner of raising funds from a large number of people. Recently,...

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The rules about rewards are somewhat vague and it might seem like you could get away with giving rewards in some cases without it turning it into taxable income. However, accountant that I talked to strongly recommended never giving out any rewards including no priority support.

2:44 PM · Aug 23, 2021Twitter Web App

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Since if you start giving out any rewards at all, the CRA is going to be very tempted to claim that all the donations are business income, including from other sources. Best to just keep it all clean of anything they could possibly claim is a product or service being offered.

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Yep. This is something I looked into back when I started accepting pizza donations. No strings attached, no promises. Thanks for all the info, nice to have something to refer back to if I need it.

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