I’m in the same situation (working remotely without conducting business for getting less than $5000 per year in income and the company refuses to change the payment method even if I signed a W8-BEN)
Got the definite/official answer through phoning to the ɪʀɪꜱ at Austin back in 2016 :
We give an ɪᴛɪɴ for filling a tax return. We don’t give an ɪᴛɪɴ for opening a bank account.
So if you don’t pay taxes to the ɪʀɪꜱ, you can’t get an ɪᴛɪɴ.
An often stated workaround if to register a business in the United States in order to open a bank account.
But in that case you’ll have to pay corporates taxes in a way which will still require to pay personal taxes in your home country. So it’s not a solution either.
So how to cash‑in ᴀᴄʜ check when banks in your country don’t provide a working way to do it ?
This solution only works if the target currency is a world reserve currency (like euro or British Pound or Yen).
The answer is simple ! Purchase cryptocurrencies in ᴜꜱᴅ with your checks with sites like paxful.
There is a drawback though : YOU CAN AND WILL GET ROBERED IN RIP DEALS MANY TIMES losing several dozen of thousands dollars across years. You’ll find criminals smarter than you successfully fooling you playing the honest guy even if you think otherwise.
You’ll also acquire a special type of reputation at your local police station.
But once you have cryptocurrencies you sell it to your home fiat currency on a centralized cryptocurrency exchange which offers to withdraw your local fiat for free (which will avoid getting robered on the sell side).
Advantages :
You access the market directly so there’s no fee at all for relying on someone which will do it for you. There’s absolutely no margin on the exchange rate (as long as you get quick due to cryptocurrencies price volatility).
And on the sell side many centralized exchanges don’t charge fees on POST order (otherwise fee is below 0.3%) which makes the entire process will only cost you the miner fee if successful (which currently can be achieved for less than 2¢ which several hundreds time less than a wire transfer).
You can compare this with opening a checking account at an expensive bank accepting non resident aliens which makes you’ll be charged up to 20% of the amount with various and mostly hidden fees which also include ones of your local bank (in my case I can’t exchange below 1.35$ per 1€ through banks whereas the market rate is at 1.12$/1€).
So until there’s a bank or a financial institution proposing a checking account without dormant account fees and minimum balances and to cash checks and ᴀᴄʜ wire transfer for free and charge less than 2% on international debit card transactions and accept to open an account without coming at branch your almost only option is to accept getting stolen by criminals. This is something you need to accept as well as many peoples have to accept using payday lenders.
This is also a good example of the damage hard line immigration policies can do while forging a Social Security number was worthing a try under Obama era.
