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This is not as easy as it sounds, either way really. You very quickly get into tax evasion, whether you know this or not (which is not an excuse). A lot of peop
by anonzzzies 2y ago
This is not as easy as it sounds, either way really. You very quickly get into tax evasion, whether you know this or not (which is not an excuse). A lot of people I know (I know almost only entrepreneurs in my friend circles) have companies elsewhere (outside the EU) for this reason; most of them are <<1m$ / year companies and those companies almost exclusively are not legal here IF someone would find out. You cannot open an offshore (US/Belize/HK/SG/whatever), pay legal taxes there and that's it; if the gravity (decision power) is in an EU country, you are running a defacto local company for the taxes and you need to pay the taxes you would pay on a German company if in Germany and then figure out how to fix the US taxes with that, creating a huge mess.
Of course they usually won't find out (no-one is going to check for a few 100ks/year), but it's not legal. To do it properly, you need multiple people as shareholders who do not live in your country and who have the decision power, or at least you definitely don't have it alone. So if you have someone in Mexico, someone in Thailand and you in Germany, and decision power/shares is 1/3rd for all, you'd be fine. But you in Germany with 100% ownership of a Delaware company is not something you can do unless you pay GmbH taxes, in which case, what's the use? Well, I guess if you are looking for US VC money, that might be a use case for it even though you pay defacto GmbH taxes.
- unmole 2y ago> You very quickly get into tax evasion, whether you know this or not I don't understand where you got tax evasion from my comment? US LLC's are pass through entities by default. All income from the LLC directly flows to the GmbH which pays the normal tax rate in Germany. When the time comes to sell, transfer of the LLC is a share deal which avoids the downsides of the asset deal which TFA describes.
- anonzzzies 2y ago> I don't understand where you got tax evasion from my comment? I didn't say you did, I said that many people (as I see from experience every day) think it's fine to just easily and cheaply open a company somewhere (as you did say) else and then follow their tax rules and that's it. And that's not true. You didn't quite mention you intended this in conjunction with a GmbH, so it sounded like 'quick and easy offshore' which I was responding to. Also, depending on the ownership / structure of this xmas tree, you might still not quite benefit from this as you think. It's complex matter and many people just do it without giving it too much thought. Which works if things stay small-ish.
- unmole 2y ago> You didn't quite mention you intended this in conjunction with a GmbH, so it sounded like 'quick and easy offshore' which I was responding to. I quoted the part of the article that was describing a dual company structure.
- anonzzzies 2y agoAh, I didn't read that from it, apologies.