Suppose you are self-employed, and you hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines to help manage your administrative tasks, and that person accepts payment in

Suppose you are self-employed, and you hire a virtual assistant in the Philippines to help manage your administrative tasks, and that person accepts payment in Bitcoin. Under the I.R.S. guidance, you have to obtain a taxpayer identification number from the assistant, just as if you were paying the person in dollars. Not, to my understanding, actually accurate. Assuming your assistant in the Philippines is not a US person and performs no work physically within the United States, then their income from you is not US-source. You have no obligation to 1099 them (and, indeed, filing a 1099 would be incorrect). If you wanted to develop a paper trail for explaining to a later examiner why you didn't 1099 them you could ask for a W8-BEN, which is basically just "The named person certifies they are not a US person. Signed, Named Person" with a few more form fields. You aren't even, to my understanding, obligated to get that.