Gold Card or Representative Office?

I’ve been living in Taiwan for the past 2 years on a student visa (studying mandarin).

I’m not sure if I can get another visa extension if I keep studying, so I’m trying to get a visa through a representative office.

  1. I own an e-commerce store through a single member LLC in the US, so for tax purposes my personal and the company assets are treated as if they were the same by the IRS.

  2. My company has way over $160.000 NTD in revenue, but because everything is mixed up when I file taxes, I’m not sure if they would be ok with it.

  3. I still have 3 months until my Visa expires.

Is it ok to try to apply for a Gold Card visa and a work visa through a Representative office at the same time?

I don’t see why it would be an issue.

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I think applying for both is fine. And it seems you should be able to set up the rep office successfully. But the Gold Card will probably be an issue, per the gold card thread it doesn’t seem likely that a pass through LLC will allow for the tax documentation that they are seeking. They want w-2 income. There were a few cases where k1s or 1099s passed but those seem pretty rare and had unique justifications.

Good luck!

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I guess I will just open a representative office anyway, and try my luck with the gold card.

I find it hard that they will grant me a gold card, since I only have to file a 1040 with a lot of blank fields + 5472.

I’ll attach a 1099-K from the PayPal and Stripe but I find it almost impossible that they will accept it anyway, but who knows, I got my student ARC that way without having to open a Taiwanese bank account.