Overview
Some tax treaty forms expire at the end of the calendar year. In order to claim the treaty exemption for payments dated in 2021, you may need to renew your tax treaty through the Glacier Online Nonresident Alien Tax Compliance System (Glacier) and send new tax treaty forms to the Glacier & Taxation Team in the UC San Diego Payroll Division.
If you think you qualify for a tax treaty exemption, go through your Glacier record screen by screen. Glacier will determine your tax treaty eligibility, offer you any applicable treaty, and generate the forms you need to submit.
Critical Concepts
You can submit 2021 tax treaties and treaty renewals anytime.
Documents arriving after November 22 will be processed, but perhaps not in time to affect your first 2021 payments. No matter when you submit 2021 tax treaty forms, upon review UCPath will recalculate your 2021 pay to include the treaty. The turnaround time for that might be as long as 4 weeks.
Eligible payment types
- Fellowship (stipend) payments: Graduate student fellowships (stipends) and postdoc fellowships are common examples of fellowship payments. Without a treaty, fellowship payments to nonresident aliens on F or J status are subject to 14% federal tax withholding. Form W-8BEN is valid for three calendar years. No withholding is required on fellowship payments to resident aliens, so Glacier may show that you are treaty eligible without generating Form W-8BEN.
- Salary/wage payments dated in 2021 will be subject to federal tax withholding even if you qualify for treaty exemption unless you renew your tax treaty.
Steps to Take
Follow the instructions in the November 9, 2020 "Income Tax Treaty Exemption Renewal (University of California, San Diego)" email from Glacier (support@online-tax.net).
If you did not get that email, please follow the steps below.
- Access Glacier (instructions below) and go through every screen in your Glacier record, updating as necessary. Do NOT change the date of entry to the U.S. If you qualify for a tax treaty exemption at the time of payment, Glacier will offer it to you. Either way, continue to the end of the record.
- Review the forms Glacier generates at the end. .
- Digitally sign and date the forms Glacier generates.
- Form 8233: "sign here" in Section III: Certification on page 2 of the form. If you sign the withholding agent section the form is invalid. It's o.k. if box 11b of this form is incorrect.
- Form W-8BEN: "sign here" line
- Form W-9 "signature of U.S. person" line. If Glacier generated this form for you, it means you will be a resident for tax purposes for at least part of 2021. Glacier generates only page 1 of Form W-9. Page 2 states, "For federal tax purposes, you are considered a U.S. person if you are an individual who is a U.S. citizen or U.S. resident alien."
- Create a single pdf of the signed forms and any document copies Glacier requests.
- Email the pdf from your UCSD.edu account to the UCSD Payroll and Taxation Team at glacier@ucsd.edu. Emails between two UCSD email addresses are secure. Note the Payroll Division is closed for in-person business; we are all working remotely.