51–60 of 77 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Corporation tax in the UK is currently at 19%. If you are a UK tax resident, you also have to pay dividend tax which starts at 7.5% (over your allowance).
More information here: https://www.gov.uk/tax-on-dividends It jumps significantly (next step up is 32.5%) once you move into the higher income tax brackets, which start at £46k: https://www.gov.uk/income-tax-rates
After looking into it for a while, i decided not to do it. Context: I live in Germany for roughly 2/3 of the year, rest is traveling. Not sure where you are located, but if you spend the majority of your time in a other EU country (e.g. Germany) you will have a very hard time explaining to the local tax authorities that the company entity is not effectively being managed from Germany. And when you fail to explain thi…
Through a US company, I employed a US citizen residing in Germany, as a contractor. It was terrible! Every German accountant we talked to acted like he was a unicorn and wanted to charge us tens of thousands of dollars to figure it out. We muddled through, no doubt doing it wrong... but it didn’t seem like there’d be any way that’d be right.
Would it be easier to convince EU customers that your US (SaaS?) business is trustworthy if you operated in Estonia?
In my experience of trying to sell a SaaS to small businesses, their only location-based concern is about where the data is hosted and if we are GDPR compliant. If you can offer hosting in some EU AWS or Google Cloud region that will be much more useful.
I considered it for my SaaS business. But at the moment my business is based in Poland, so moving to Estonia doesn't change things much (I still can't economically sell to individuals within the EU because of idiotic VAT regulations). I chose to remain in Poland for the time being. On the plus side: low taxes, EU law, first patent troll doesn't bankrupt my business. On the minus side: Stripe continues to ignore Polan…
Can you elaborate on how does being in Poland protect you from patent trolls?
I considered it for my SaaS business. But at the moment my business is based in Poland, so moving to Estonia doesn't change things much (I still can't economically sell to individuals within the EU because of idiotic VAT regulations). I chose to remain in Poland for the time being. On the plus side: low taxes, EU law, first patent troll doesn't bankrupt my business. On the minus side: Stripe continues to ignore Polan…
What VAT regulations are keeping you from selling to other EU customers?
If you think this is easy, tell me how much VAT (and in which currency) you will charge a customer from AX today, and what you'll do about a customer from GB in March. None of this is obvious, and it all changes quickly.
As others have pointed out, there are services that supposedly help with this. I looked at everything that was available a couple of years ago and none of the available solutions did this easily and correctly. It's not an easily outsourceable problem, either, as it has to integrate closely with your billing.
For B2B customers this is not an issue: you don't charge VAT (reverse charge) and you're done.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently VAT collection was changed for electronic services. Before you simply charged your countries applicable tax rate, unless a VAT ID was provided. Now you have to charge the VAT rate applicable to your customers country of residence, forcing every vendor to care for and implement correct VAT rates and regulations for all your products and every of the 28 countries in the EU - possibly even more due to bilateral…
Fines yes but felony charges? Any references to that for the weird EU VAT of that actually happening unless it was deliberate, large scale avoidance? I messed up with it a lot but (obviously) accidentally and on a small scale; I get a slap on the wrist and some back taxes when audited. Not even fines.
Doing VAT wrong is really not an option.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you elaborate on how does being in Poland protect you from patent trolls?
I'm not the OP, but a company I worked for once had reason to set up a US presence, but decided against it because once you have a US entity, patent trolls have someone to sue in their jurisdiction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Recently VAT collection was changed for electronic services. Before you simply charged your countries applicable tax rate, unless a VAT ID was provided. Now you have to charge the VAT rate applicable to your customers country of residence, forcing every vendor to care for and implement correct VAT rates and regulations for all your products and every of the 28 countries in the EU - possibly even more due to bilateral…
Fines yes but felony charges? Any references to that for the weird EU VAT of that actually happening unless it was deliberate, large scale avoidance? I messed up with it a lot but (obviously) accidentally and on a small scale; I get a slap on the wrist and some back taxes when audited. Not even fines.