> governments should not haunt founders for alleged tax crimes over paper valuations > Our banks don’t like startup founders and neither do many of our tax age

> governments should not haunt founders for alleged tax crimes over paper valuations > Our banks don’t like startup founders and neither do many of our tax agencies, who often consider paper wealth to be real wealth. While they consider the paper wealth to be real, the tax agencies want to get paid with actual cash. > Banks, tax agencies and even family members distrust startups and will make life difficult for you. And on top of that the insane, purely insane, amount of paperwork. And if you mess up, it's fines, fines, more fines, then fines over the fines for not having paid the fines soon enough. The problem in most of the EU countries is that there's an ever growing public sector and administrations that always inflate in size full of people producing hardly anything besides rules and crazy paperwork that those who want to actually work have then to fill. You have IRS public servants coming to your place and saying stuff like (this happened to me): "Had I opened your file before I'd have noticed there was no money to take". I was clean but this gives the mindset: these guys come knocking at your door with the mindset: "There's money for the state to seize". I've literally seen a public servant, while I was very polite, not answering me, taking a paper from a pile of paper, the only pile of paper in its office, and slam it on the desk, without saying a word while she was... Playing minesweeper. For the role of that one public servant was to "serve" that one paper (some stuff you had to fill to require the right to prevent other people from parking in your street when the moving truck comes: of course this requires one dedicated servant only for that in every single town hall in Belgium? WTF...). It's a never ending Brazil (the movie) dystopia infernal circle of paperwork leading to more taxes being paid, leading to more public servants being hired, leading to new taxes. As the saying goes: *"In France you plant public servants and taxes grow" ("En France on plante des fonctionnaires et il pousse des impots").