As anyone can see, I run AdSense here on Daggle. It's more for playing and seeing how it works than any big money maker. At some point, I've promised Jennifer Slegg to go onto her Click This! podcast and throw all my AdSense newbie questions her way. There are so many things I find odd about how it works. This post is about one of those, trying to get paid in US dollars if you're not based in the US.

As my traffic went up and my AdSense placements improved, I started getting a check each month, rather than once or twice per year. These checks come to me in US dollars, sent to my UK address. Depositing them either meant waiting until my next trip back to the US, to put them in my bank there, or firing them off to my US dollar account with Citibank UK (which I highly recommend for any expats). The account is great, but it started to be a pain to be mailing these physical checks off to Citibank.

I decided to get all digital and have my funds sent electronically to my US bank in the US. I headed over to the My Account area in AdSense, went to Account Settings, Payment Details, Add A New Bank Account and stalled.

There was no place to give my US account number and bank routing number. Instead, everything was oriented for UK accounts, which use sort codes and account numbers. Ugh.

I asked AdSense support about this and was told that I could only have electronic payments made to my listed country of residence -- the UK -- for "tax and security" reasons.

Ah, security. I can't tell you the number of times that gets trotted out when I have to deal with some banking issue in the US from the UK. I usually feel it's just a convenient excuse for "you're a weird situation, we don't want to deal with that."

Fine. How about changing my account to a US address. Nope, it turns out you can't do that. Once you list a country for your AdSense account, apparently you have to live in that country for all eternity. There goes my plans to retire back home in California. Thanks, AdSense, for robbing me of my golden years :)

Alternatively, you can close your AdSense account and create a new one, I was told. I declined that fun option. Instead, I decided to do EFT to my US dollar account that's based in the UK.

That led to another problem. To verify an account, AdSense makes a small deposit. I could see this arrive in my account. However, I couldn't complete verification because AdSense wanted the amount in UK pounds.

I didn't know the amount in UK pounds, since this was a dollar account. To know the amount, I'd have to know what exchange rate Google was using internally, which isn't listed. Why not try some guestimates? Well, you get four tries, then you lock out that account for EFT purposes permanently.

I followed up with Google on this, and it got even more complex. AdSense support said it was likely Google converted from dollars to pounds to send the deposit, then the bank converted again from pounds back to dollars since this is a dollar-based account. What a pain!

So there it sits, my account all unverified. Meanwhile, I was able to set up a UK pound account to do EFTs. The downside to this is that the payments will be changed to whatever rate Google decides, rather than you changing up when you prefer.

That brings me to an email I got from AdSense today, telling me to sign-up for EFT! Out of the blue, it highlighted all the problems I had:

• We can only make EFT payments to bank accounts in your country of residence. This means that if your AdSense account is in the US, we can't make payments to your UK bank account.
   
• We can only make EFT payments in your local currency. For example, if you live in Canada but your bank account is in US dollars, your bank may not accept these payments or they may convert your payment to US Dollars. So that your AdSense payment is not converted twice, we recommend that you use a bank account in your country's local currency.

I hope these problems go away. In particular, I'd urge AdSense to:

• Make it possible to change your country of residence.
   
• Make it possible to pay to accounts in more than one country.
   
• Make it possible to indicate the base currency of an account in any country, so that I can ensure dollars into a UK-based dollar account stay in dollars. Yes, Virginia, people outside the US can indeed have accounts based in dollars.

If it helps, link some of these extended options to what tax information is provided to AdSense. Google has my US taxpayer ID. They know I've got a US-based connection. There's no particular security reason to then prevent me from paying into a US-based account.

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