YouTube Video Transcript:

"Foreign non-resident withholding. Easily one of the most complicated and frustrating issues. If you're a foreign person or a business, you may have discovered sadly that 30% of your US payment is about to be withheld for taxes. And it could be higher than that. If you're in a high tax state like California or New York, these payments or withholdings can happen despite the fact that you qualify for treaty exceptions, there can be confusion with the payor, and in some cases it's not even income at all. I'm Douglas Greenberg. I'm an international tax attorney and I specialize in foreign non-resident alien withholding. These cases, they come in basically one of two stages. So, first stage is the pre-withholding or what we call transaction case stage. The other stage is postwithholding or what we call recovery cases. So, we'll start with pre-withholding. So in cases like this, you're doing the legal research and trying to reassure the payer that they are not going to be on the hook for underwithholding because that's the one of the central problems in these cases is that the payer they can be held liable if they don't withhold enough and the IRS can turn around and and shake them down basically for the unwithheld amount. So they're very skittish and they tend to be conservative and you're working with them to reassure them that that's not going to happen. as an example, recently kind of a one-hit wonder band came into town and they were going to have 30% withheld from their concert fee, the performance fee. And so we had to work with the concert promoters to try to get that rate down to the actual rate that it should have been, which is significantly lower. In these cases, like I said, push back can happen and it can be a bit of a process. Another type of case is the post-withholding or recovery cases we call them. This is where the money's been withheld. You're now filing IRS filings and refund claims trying to get it back. So, as an example, guy came in recently, hundreds of thousands withheld from his US bank, spent years trying to get this money refunded, filing tons of different things, none of that really going anywhere. And the the problem was the payment was never associated with him in the first place.  Not only did he waste a lot of time. Now the the issue is, since we were able to associate the payment with him, the IRS is now saying his claims are time barred. It's just one of many examples of how these cases can become complicated very quickly. If you have a foreign non-resident withholding case, use any of the links on the screen to call. We're I think like one of the only places you can call about these issues because all the people who specialize in them, typically they're in big fancy office buildings with no direct line, you know, PWC tucked awayin the international tax department or Ernst & Young or whatever it is. It's free. Five minutes probably can give you the low down on whether this is something we can help with and what the fees would likely cost. So, give us a call. Love to hear the stories."