I got an email yesterday from a title officer in Texas (hi, Chip, and thanks!) who was interested in any wrinkles I might know about in the universe of withholding.  He will be giving some training sessions on this topic. I gave him a call this morning and chatted briefly this morning on the phone.

No, I don't know of any wrinkles or secret wisdom.  As far as I have experienced, the whole withholding tax situation for the real estate professionals is a pretty simple deal:

Nonresidents will frequently use corporations to own U. S. real estate. (Briefly -- use a non-U.S. corporation, mind the corporate formalities, and hope that the U. S. tax authorities don't change their minds). Corporations are chosen because they protect against estate tax, people know and understand corporations, and because they are cheap to create and operate.

I try to get my clients out of them and into better ways to own their real estate.

THE PROBLEM WITH CORPORATIONS

This falls in the category of Shameless Self-Promotion.

I spoke yesterday at the 2007 International Tax and Business Conference in San Francisco. My topic was "Multinational Families: When a Border Runs Through Your Balance Sheet." The conference was organized by the California CPA Education Foundation.

Just a note here to say that the FIRPTA.com blog is reawakening after a long nap. Sorry I've been gone. But I've been good -- speaking and doing deals. Anyway, bookmark the site or subscribe to the RSS feed. I will be reposting, starting tomorrow.

The website is in the process of a redesign. It has been ported to Drupal because of the expansion plans for this site, and I think Drupal will handle those plans better than WordPress would have.

Some U.S. documents must be notarized. It is absolutely guaranteed that there will be some of these in any real estate transaction.