I now understand why Americans hate the IRS

So to be nice to people following my original account ( @lethn1 ) and to some this will either be horrific or enjoyable depending on how you find my viewpoints, I have decided to be organised and create a separate account for politics. I should be able to make more regular posts here because it will just be me doing political commentary on various topics and I think one of the first ones I'm going to be dealing with today is the IRS because I just recently had to deal with my first legal form for setting up credit/debit card payments for my games company.

I have signed up to avoid paypal's ridiculousness with a payment gateway called 2Checkout, amongst all the information I had to fill out, I had to deal with a form known as W-8BEN. To 2Checkout's credit, they made the process pretty easy and got everything set up for me so I just had to give personal details and check things off and I should be able to digitally sign it so that will get the process done fairly quickly. However, the fact is, I'm a British Citizen, I'm a startup and sole trader so I not only have no obligation to pay taxes to the IRS I don't even have the damn income yet I'm already being forced to fill out forms for them just because the company is based in the U.S.

I feel your pain Americans, to make matters more annoying, my income is going to get immediately converted to British Pounds anyway, really it seems this is just a way of them keeping tabs on currency that is leaving the country.

https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/form-w-8ben-certificate-of-foreign-status-of-beneficial-owner-for-united-states-tax-withholding

Here's some detailed and official information about it for those interested, if you do any kind of business in the U.S with a company you will need to fill it out if you are taking in any earnings.