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Germany is one of the worst countries when it comes to bureaucracy nothing is fast here if you go the legal path and stay within the law (which is mostly for sm
by robtro 3mo ago
Germany is one of the worst countries when it comes to bureaucracy nothing is fast here if you go the legal path and stay within the law (which is mostly for small people big players have different ways) and as you see everything costs a lot so if you are founding a pure online business do yourself a favor and incorporate somewhere else and if you still live in Germany look into licensing or subcontracting yourself to your company in another country it's way more flexible and you probably have Easier access to grants etc.
Another part is taxation the tax office takes your money really fast but returns can be another slog where the tax office denies legal claims again and again untill you get a lawyer etc. and it generates costs again needlessly because it's really dependent on who works on your tax records and there mood apparently.
- Lionga 3mo ago[dead]
- earcar 3mo agoI have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about. Trains, Berlin Brandenburg Airport, this. It's rules and adherence to rules, more than efficiency, that I've found in my experience.
- odiroot 3mo agoThere is no efficiency to be found. It's a "cover your ass" mentality that resists any changes.
- ExpertAdvisor01 3mo agoAnother recent example : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/10/germanys-hs2-delayed-five-years-engineering-blunder/#comment https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/06/10/germanys-h... They laid 600+km of cables wrong ultimately delaying the project by 6 years.
- Medowar 3mo agoThe efficiency is a thing of the past, an mainly when dealing with manufacturing, which we were really good at. The world got faster, but german industries and politics never got the memo.
- leokennis 3mo agoMy experience with German colleagues is not efficiency; but they do have a remarkable ability (in my field) to read a 400 page regulator rulebook and overlay it on a 200 page design document and pinpoint the rulebook edge cases not covered by the design...
- moooo99 3mo ago> I have yet to find the mythical efficiency everyone was talking about. Comes down to a misrepresentation of history. Germans were never known to be efficient, they were known to be precise with everything, including bureaucracy. This happens to be handy with machinery, but not much else.
- WarmWash 3mo ago...but their machinery (or cars and motorcycles at least) are needlessly complex and unbelievably frustrating to work on. Really I think that they just landed on some really successful marketing.
- moooo99 3mo ago> Really I think that they just landed on some really successful marketing. It depends. For some machinery the complexity is inherent, this makes German machines very good at what they do. But this approach does not tend to scale well, which is part of the reason the German economy tends to be fairly specialized with „hidden champion“ SMEs. Made in Germany has (had?) a very positive connotation to it, but for historic reasons.
- WarmWash 3mo agoJapanese engineers seem to have figured out the "inherent complexity".
- selfmodruntime 3mo agoThis was an advantage when bureaucracy was still young. It's a beast that only grows though.
- sevenzero 3mo agoGermans a rule based and were really precise which came in handy like 50 years ago. The modern German is not flexible enough for the modern job market. German companies are also not flexible enough to compete. Germany goes downhill for a reason.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoIt's a mistake to think Germany is efficient, I don't know where they got that stereotype. Germans are thorough, not efficient.
- dgellow 3mo agoIt’s from >50y ago, then became a meme detached from reality. And for some reasons people are still repeating it even if they know literally nothing about the country
- nopurpose 3mo agoDoesn't Germany have Controled Foreign Company rules?
- ExpertAdvisor01 3mo agoYes , but cfc rules are mostly targeted against passive income and exclude active companies. They wouldn't matter in that case anyway as he would shift the tax residency to Germany by managing & controlling the company from Germany.
- ExpertAdvisor01 3mo agoDon't incorporate somewhere else it will only lead to disaster. The company will end up being German tax resident anyways due to management and control being in Germany as you live in Germany . Then you have to be compliant in 2 jurisdictions (file forms/balance sheets in both countries etc..) and worst case you could become subject to double taxation (if there is no agreement). The optimal solution is just to leave Germany .
- fakedang 3mo agoCan't you just incorporate a Wyoming LLC (zero corporate tax + federal tax because you're non-resident in the US) then just open a Wise account? Wyoming LLC gives passthrough taxation, and because you're in Germany, you'll be subject to German corporate and personal taxes alone, I presume? Edit: changed from just personal tax to personal+corporate
- petesergeant 3mo agoFinanzamt may well decide this is a German company in the cunning disguise of a cowboy hat, and charge it German corporate tax
- fakedang 3mo agoWhich is still fine imo. My idea was not about skipping German corporate or personal taxes - it was about skipping German bureaucracy.
- petesergeant 3mo ago> it was about skipping German bureaucracy By creating a company that requires a special filing status to the German tax office?
- fakedang 3mo agoOuch, is that painful too? Damn.
- anonzzzies 3mo agoI do not know an EU or Asian country that doesn’t have a similar paperwork misery; I had a company in DE and in many others; you won’t survive in Spain as SL if you are small and follow the rules either. So literally no one does. No different in DE. We never got fined or even reprimanded. Largest fine in DE we got was for charging the wrong VAT for some items and that was not really that bad compared to all the tax breaks we got.
- adamors 3mo agoIn Romania it's so bad that there are companies who will handle everything for you, even if technically the chamber of commerce has a digital interface as well. Everything is handled online and you get digitally signed papers in a reasonable amount of time. This is probably the solution, an EU-wide company that has local offshoots and can handle the bureaucracy for a fee.
- Schlagbohrer 3mo agoWhen there is an industry offering workarounds-as-a-service, then it is time for legal reform.
- tga 3mo agoAs far as I know, incorporating a BV in the Netherlands can be done in 1-2 weeks, with a lot of less pain. Many services are integrated and available online.
- f6v 3mo agoEstonia makes it very easy.
- irwt 3mo agoI don't think you've lived in many EU or Asian countries... While incorporation sucks in France, Spain, and Germany, in most North European countries, East European countries, and even in most Balkan countries, it's a breeze (when compared to Germany).
- 3mo ago
- NooneAtAll3 3mo ago> nothing is fast here if you go the legal path and stay within the law > and as you see everything costs a lot this sounds like a system primed for corruption if you can pay half the needed amount to do everything 5 times as fast, would you not do it?
- onli 3mo agoBut you can't. It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form, and there is no regular fast pass.
- NooneAtAll3 3mo ago> It's not like you can bribe the bureaucrat working on your form are you trying to say "bureaucrat can't speed up" or are you doubting someone physically can't give someone else some cash?
- echoangle 3mo agoThe third option is “they could speed up but won’t do it for a bribe”.
- Aachen 3mo agoAs someone living in Germany, I would be very surprised if someone legit manages to bribe their way to skip a step somewhere. At an institutional level, perhaps it's more surprising if it never ever happens anywhere at all; but at an individual level, your particular case hitting a bribeable person and you knowing of it seems like worse odds than seeing a shooting star during a solar eclipse. Maybe if you are close family, or close enough plus a sob story, the person might have the ability to handle your case first; that sounds like something the computer system would allow in order to avoid getting stuck on a case they can't currently work on (for whatever reason) at the head of the queue. They're probably not the only step though so it might not help much
- onli 3mo agoIt literally can't be done, in Germany. There is corruption in Germany, but it simply does not exist at this level. It also wouldn't work in practice: You would have to find out who is the office worker working on your documents (you usually don't know that, and never in advance). Then that person has safeguards: He is part of a team, someone will check his work, usually at least a colleague and his boss. Assume you'd try anyway, you meet the person somehow alone - how would you find out whether he is corruptible? If you try to ask you will face severe consequences. Plus, it's never worth it for him: If they were caught they would be facing jail time, lose their job, all the benefits already earned (the special pension state servants get, their health insurance, ...). You'd have to offer that much money that all of that is worth it. Not even twenty times the money we are talking about here would be enough.
- meta_gunslinger 3mo agoIt's the scientific slash managerial state brought to you by Anglo-German leftist thinkers of the 19th century. Enjoy utopia.
- sliqqq 3mo ago100% agreed! Reality is, many german businesses are just flying under the radar, as they simply dont want or cannot deal with all the tax crazyness and bureaucracy.
- pawelkomarnicki 3mo agoI never had any issue with Finanzamt being slow, they take my money with a proper disclosure ahead and also as quickly pay whatever I’m owed back