https://www.quora.com/What-forms-does-a-UK-company-need-to-return-to-the-IRS-for-tax-return-of-app-revenue-from-the-App-Store
Hi,
Not sure if you got to the bottom of this or if you're still following your topic... however I'm looking at a similar situation. I'm still trying to get to the bottom of it, but can tell you my understanding so far (and as I'm sure you've seen with all the other confusing/conflicting information out there, I must give the disclaimer that I'm not a tax professional so I'm just recounting experiences and giving non-professional opinions!):
W-8BEN-E is only meant to be held be the person/organisation paying you (they then have to submit another form in their annual returns reporting on who they have given 'treaty benefits' to (i.e. no witholding of tax)).
I phoned the IRS and they told me that I would need to write to them giving a detailed reason why I believe I should not have to fill out a 1120F as they can't do it over the phone; she also suggested that I may just want to complete the 1120F and that when they saw we had no USA derived income, they would remove the need for us to submit another in the future. From other sources I gather that App store revenue doesn't count as US-derived revenue. The reason for this is that we're not actually operating in the US, we're just being paid for the digital goods that we supply to Apple to sell; it's the fact that Apple is a US based organisation that we need the W-8BEN-E.
I'm going to look at the 1120F and see how troublesome it is to fill in for a 'zero' return, if it's massively complicated then I'll just write in to the IRS and send a copy of the full W-8BEN-E form (I'd ended up having to send a scanned paper copy to Apple as they didn't like the online one and couldn't modify it after it was first submitted), highlighting that we have no income/business in the US and that the only reason we applied for an EIN was at Apple's request so that they could pay us for our apps sold on the App store by them.
On a separate note, I did run into this post on Quora which suggests that we never needed to apply for an EIN in the first place and that we could have simply supplied our Corporation Tax identifier which would have saved all of this messing about (IRS forms and documents are as bad if not worse than HMRC ones I think and they take a load of time to understand/process - not good when you are a tiny operation and need that time to be developing!)
https://www.quora.com/What-forms-does-a-UK-company-need-to-return-to-the-IRS-for-tax-return-of-app-revenue-from-the-App-Store
One other post, not directly related to us, but still about a UK company is this one (If correct, the expert does explain reasonably well what the rules are):
https://www.justanswer.com/tax/9tjo1-need-fill-w-8ben-e-uk-ltd-company-exporting.html
Hope that helps in some way. Alternatively, if you did get to a resolution already yourself, it would be great if you could post your experience as it may end up helping other small companies in the same situation.
EDIT: I found another, this one is quite long-winded, but has a load of useful information (looking at the description it may even be yours...):
https://www.justanswer.com/tax/ab1oe-experience-irs-form-1120-f.html
Thanks
