Running a US Company From Abroad: What Comes After Formation

Four things have to happen before you can invoice anyone, and they can't be run in parallel. Each one needs a document the previous step produces.

1. Get the EIN. You do not need an ITIN, and you do not need an SSN. The instructions for Form SS-4 are direct about it:

   "Enter 'foreign' or N/A on line 7b if the responsible party doesn't have and is ineligible to obtain an SSN or ITIN."

   IRS, Instructions for Form SS-4. The online application won't work without a US principal office, so you fax the form to 855-215-1627 from inside the US or 304-707-9471 from outside it. There's also a phone line for international applicants, 267-941-1099, open 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 p.m. Eastern time, Monday through Friday, and it isn't toll-free.

   The IRS says you can receive your EIN by fax within a few business days." Plan for one to three weeks.

2. Open the bank account. You can't start this before step 1, because every institution asks for the EIN confirmation letter, the CP 575. Bring the articles of organization, the CP 575, your passport, proof of your residential address, and the operating agreement. Approval turns on where you live, not which state you incorporated in. Mercury and Relay both gate on owner residence, so a Wyoming filing does nothing for you here.

3. Apply for the payment processor. This can't start before step 2, because a processor needs somewhere to send the money. Stripe's US-residency line is narrower than most people think, and reading it carefully is worth a few minutes:

   "Unregistered businesses must have a business owner or representative physically located in the US"

   "Registered businesses must be registered in the US, even if you operate in another country"

   "All businesses must provide the address of the physical location where the majority of your business activity is carried out (PO Boxes are not accepted)"

   Stripe, Requirements for having a US Stripe account. The residency sentence is scoped to unregistered businesses. Your LLC is a registered business, and the requirement that lands on it is registration in the US, which you already satisfy. The sentence that actually causes trouble is the third one, because a registered agent's office is not where the majority of your business activity is carried out.

   Shopify Payments is stricter about the bank account and more relaxed about you:

   "The bank account must be a full checking account with a bank in the United States in USD currency. The bank account must be eligible for Automated Clearing House (ACH) transfers."

   "If the account representative doesn't have an SSN or ITIN, then ensure their residential address is correctly set to their home outside of the United States. This displays an option to provide a photograph of a valid passport instead of an SSN or ITIN."

   Shopify, Bank account and personal information requirements for using Shopify Payments in the United States. Savings accounts, wire-transfer-only checking accounts, and money transfer services are excluded. Business addresses are supported in the 50 states and Puerto Rico only.

4. Start bookkeeping the day the first dollar moves. Not in March. Owner capital contributions and owner-paid expenses are reportable transactions on Form 5472, and reconstructing them eleven months later is where most first-year filings go wrong.

Then two dates go in a calendar and stay there: your state's annual report, and the federal pro forma 1120 with Form 5472 attached, due April 15 and extendable to October 15 on Form 7004.

Filing Form 5472 is paper only. There is no e-file path. It goes by fax to 855-887-7737, or by mail to Internal Revenue Service, 1973 Rulon White Blvd, M/S 6112, Attn: PIN Unit, Ogden, UT 84201. That address is specific to this filing, and the instructions are explicit that foreign-owned US disregarded entities "do not use the mailing addresses provided in the Instructions for Form 1120."

The 1120 it attaches to is nearly blank. Per the instructions, "the only information required to be completed on Form 1120 is the name and address of the foreign-owned U.S. DE and items B and E on the first page."

Asset to produce before publish: one timeline graphic showing the four steps as dependent bars on a 0-to-8-week axis, with the IRS's stated 4-day EIN turnaround marked against the observed 1-to-3-week range. Alt text: "Timeline of EIN, bank account, and payment processor approval for a foreign-owned US LLC, showing each step blocked by the previous one, checked September 1, 2026."

The EIN fax goes into silence. No acknowledgment, no reference number, no status line to call. Four weeks with nothing back is common enough to plan for.

The bank declines on residence. People read this as a document problem and resubmit. It usually isn't. If you live in a country on the institution's list, better paperwork won't change the answer, and a different institution will.

Stripe rejects the address. The registered agent's address is not the place where the majority of your business activity happens, and Stripe asks for the latter.

The state annual report gets missed. The company is administratively dissolved, and you find out when a bank or processor re-runs its checks. The state's records decide your good standing, not your inbox.

The first Form 5472 is filed with no reportable transactions listed because nobody told the owner that their own capital contribution counts as one.

Beneficial ownership. FinCEN's interim final rule of March 26, 2025 removed domestic entities from the definition of a reporting company, and the final rule published and effective August 14, 2026 adopts that as final:

"exercising authority under 31 U.S.C. 5336(a)(11)(B)(xxiv) of the CTA to exempt domestic reporting companies from any BOI reporting requirements"

FinCEN, Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting Requirement Revision, 91 FR doc. 2026-16576. Published August 14, 2026. A Wyoming LLC owned entirely by a non-US person has no BOI obligation. The test is place of formation, not who owns it, which is why the ownership question never arises. Read the abstract alone and you'd draw a narrower conclusion, because the abstract foregrounds the US-person provisions. The operative exemption for domestic entities is the one quoted above.

Banks did not stop asking. Customer due diligence and KYC collection at onboarding are intact, and your bank will still want beneficial-owner information at account opening. Those are two different regimes, and only one of them ended.

If you're a US person, the residence gates described here don't bind you and the sequence is shorter. If you formed a C corporation rather than an LLC, the federal filing is a real 1120 rather than a pro forma one, and the tax analysis is different from the start.

If your entity was formed outside the US and then registered to do business in a US state, BOI still applies to you. The August 2026 exemption covers US-formed entities only, and this is the case people most often get backwards.

Every step above has its own page. The order below is the order the work happens in, not alphabetical, because the sequence is the thing most guides get wrong.

Before you file

• Which state, and what Wyoming actually costs
• Delaware, and why its annual tax changed
• California's annual minimum, and when it reaches you anyway
• Member-managed or manager-managed
• What a registered agent legally is
• Registered agent vs virtual address

The first thirty days

• Your first month, week by week
• Getting an EIN with no SSN and no ITIN
• When the EIN application goes nowhere
• EIN vs ITIN vs SSN
• The single-member operating agreement
• Opening a US business bank account from abroad
• When the bank application is declined

Getting paid

• Getting paid by US clients
• Business type at signup, and why it decides everything
• Stripe, and what it actually checks
• When Stripe rejects the account
• PayPal, and the contradiction in its own terms
• When PayPal limits or freezes the account
• Shopify Payments
• Mercury · Relay · Wise Business · Payoneer
• Etsy · Amazon Seller Central · Upwork and Fiverr
• Apple Developer · Google Play
• Google Ads and Meta verification

Tax and filing

• Are you taxed in the US at all
• What effectively connected income means
• Form 5472 and the pro forma 1120
• What a pro forma 1120 is
• What counts as a reportable transaction
• What a disregarded entity is
• Missed a Form 5472: reasonable cause and abatement
• BOI reporting in 2026, and why you file nothing
• Franchise tax, which is not a tax on franchises
• Sales tax nexus for non-resident sellers

Money out

• How to pay yourself
• Paying contractors: W-8BEN, W-9 and 1099s
• Hiring in the US: three routes
• Bookkeeping from the first transaction
• Getting a US business credit card
• Whether you need US business insurance

Keeping it alive

• Your annual compliance calendar
• Your second year
• Certificate of good standing
• Apostilles, and when a foreign bank wants one
• Changing your registered agent
• Changing your LLC's state
• Adding a co-founder
• Trademarking the brand
• Reinstating after administrative dissolution
• Selling or transferring the LLC
• Closing it, and what happens if you walk away
• The 12 mistakes that cost owners most

Before you commit to any of it

• The Compatibility Index by country of residence
• The four gates providers actually check
• What we could not verify
• Formation is one step. These are the other forty.

Already live elsewhere on this site: Form 5472, US banking for founders, the US LLC for non-US founders, and compliance.

Do I have to file a BOI report? Not if your company was formed in a US state. FinCEN's rule effective August 14, 2026 exempts every US-formed entity permanently, whoever owns it. If your entity was formed abroad and registered to do business in a US state, you are still a reporting company.

Do I need an ITIN before I can get an EIN? No. You enter "Foreign" on line 7b of Form SS-4 and the application proceeds without either an ITIN or an SSN. This is the single most common piece of bad advice in this category, and it costs people months waiting on an ITIN they never needed.

Will forming in Wyoming get me a Mercury account? No. Mercury gates on where the founder lives, not where the company is formed. Changing your state of formation changes nothing about a residence check. If you live in a country on the list, the answer is no regardless of which state issued your certificate.

Can I use my registered agent's address as my business address? For state filings, that's what it's for. For Stripe, no. Stripe asks for the physical location where the majority of business activity happens, and a registered agent's office is not that. Using it is a common cause of review holds.

What actually happens if I don't file Form 5472? A base penalty per reporting corporation per tax year. If the failure continues past the cure window after the IRS gives notice, a further amount accrues per related party for each 30-day period. The continuation penalty is the part most guides leave out, and it's the part that compounds.

How long does the whole sequence take? Plan for four to eight weeks from certificate to first invoice, assuming nothing gets declined. The EIN is the longest fixed wait and the one you can't compress. Everything after it moves quickly or fails quickly.