241–250 of 456 posts
~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…
You are doing it wrong. What they really wanted from you was a bribe, not a stack of papers. Nobody will ever openly admit they want a bribe. They will just drown you in bureaucracy until you get the idea.
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Countries with high paperwork and bureaucratic burden are famous for also being highly corrupt. This is probably not a coincidence. Likely all the excess paperwork makes it easier to hide what's really going on, easy to provide roadblocks for those who don't pay, and easier to generally hide bad activity in a sea of noise.
The paperwork is an attempt(usually misguided) to stop the corruption. The idea is that if you have to account and document all actions you will have act in the proscribed manner and not in a way that benefits you. This usually fails for the reason you posted. I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society. It is a vile and subversive menace that turns every one into…
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I have a funny story from Spain: My father's has an orange field, so at some point he wanted to dig a well to get some water. He went to the City Hall, got all the tricky paperwork and applied for permission to build it. Months passed by without hearing anything, and at some point he just forgot about it, assuming he'd be denied silently. There's some people in the city hall don't like him too much BTW. Few years lat…
A friend of mine in Spain bought a masia, but was not allowed to tear down the old building to build a new house (protected heritage or something, even though it was junk). So the way around it was to do it in steps. Replace it whole building part by part. So now he has a new house (but it looks like the old one in shape), but there's nothing left of the original.
Completely legal, but a good illustration of how even our new (and honestly much improved) zoning is too restrictive.
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It's actually kind of disturbing how there are basically only a handful of countries on the planet without systematic corruption. Maybe there are none. Perhaps it's a human trait.
Some types corruption are worse than others. With the typical Western "overpay for a modern tank/gun/piece of equipment by a factor of 2" style you still get a modern tank/gun/piece of equipment in the end. From what I heard, for example, in Russia you do that but then the quartermaster goes and sells half of your equipment off on the black market and the grunts sell off the other half and replace it with something m…
Many studies have been done and this isn't really a thing. The government isn't paying 2x (or 100-1000x as is often the rumor) for a given thing. What they're paying is the price of certification and guarantees. If the law requires that a procured item be guaranteed to NOT catch fire in an oxygen-rich environment (because it could be used in space) then the price of that product--no matter how seemingly mundane--is going to be more expensive than if you "just bought it from the store". Because someone had to setup a complicated bureaucracy and certification testing process to cover that product and actually carry out the testing.
There's also product availability guarantees that add to the price of government-procured things: A lot of stuff the government buys must continue to be manufactured for the effective life of the product in the government. This means that companies supplying stuff need to stock and maintain replacement parts for lifespans that would normally be vastly longer that a typical product cycle. They may even need to keep people trained at making and repairing these goods. That costs a lot of money!
If you're looking for corruption in Western governments it's in the form of paying political campaigns (or entire parties) to get specific laws passed or not passed. That's the big one that causes basically all the major problems in Western politics.
To a lesser extent there's also corruption involving decision-making bureaucrats getting hired by the industries they regulated after their time in office is over (this should be illegal) and politicians with insider information trading stocks. Taking direct bribes also does happen but it's rare because it's too easy to get caught and the consequences are high (high risk, low reward most of the time).
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The paperwork is an attempt(usually misguided) to stop the corruption. The idea is that if you have to account and document all actions you will have act in the proscribed manner and not in a way that benefits you. This usually fails for the reason you posted. I am not really sure how you are supposed to stop corruption once it gets rooted in your society. It is a vile and subversive menace that turns every one into…
This is a popular misconception. Paperwork is basically created as part of job being done by the government employee. This employee is hired due to connections and the paperwork created to justify the job. The pointlessness makes people exert the tiniest amount of power they have, like reddit mods. The monetary corruption is more related to salary which is related to well being of economy. For example, during British…
~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…
Not only the ease of doing business is non-existent but also the entire running the company's operations is exhaustive and riddled with inconsistencies regulations. Plus, the amount of reporting required to stay compliant is never ending.
Every month you will have to file for multiple GST reports, then file quarterly GST reports again to reconcile. On the other hand, file for quarterly advance tax, then finally file for annual income tax. To top it of, GST rules changes so frequently that the entire book keeping process becomes complex & convoluted.
You will end up spending more time in keeping all the things in check with the regulation instead of spending time on growing the business itself.
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> That's what Bolsonaro did in Brazil. In his campaign, he demonstrated to be a good christian and a person of faith. In Brazil, people strongly associate that with being a good person. Wasn't Bolsonaro elected because the previous president and his main opponent (Lula?) was so corrupt that he even landed in jail, which is a rare event for a prominent politician? > Guess what happened after. Care to explain to non Br…
I don't know if Lula committed corruption, but he apparently wasn't more corrupt than the judge who tried him, who became Bolsonaro's Minister of Justice. All the charges were dismissed eventually because of court bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luiz_Inácio_Lula_da_Silva
I couldn't understand why our news in Germany was pretending that a guy convinced of corruption would be a saviour of Brazil against the evil Bolsonaro.
That highlights one of the main problems in our societies. We just accept information served to us by our governments without much checking. Either because we don't care about every topic, or because we don't have a means to actually check.
~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…
Back when GST was introduced, they asked all exporters of software services to pay the 18% GST and then claim a refund because exports are exempted. This was before they introduced a process to apply for a "NOC" (which must be renewed periodically I think). So, I duly paid GST for the first couple of months. 5 years later, I'm yet to receive the refunds. First, they said that they were authorized to only sanction ref…
I had to apply for Foreign Export of Services Certificate as well which turned out to be the PAN number.
They also made it impossible for services exporters to claim GST back on business expenses.
~5 years ago, I hired three Indian developers. They asked me if we could set up an Indian legal entity, so that they could just get regular salaries in India with tax payments, deductions etc taken care of. I agreed and we got it done. One of the worst business-decisions of my life. The amount of red tape, stupid rules, corruption, signatures, stamps, showing up physically in a certain office etc etc... Mindblowing.…
- Have a local point of contact. If you are not Indian yourself or at least of Indian Origin, you will need to have a good local contact ideally your lead tech. who can be part of the entity
- Find a good Chartered Accountant/CA (equivalent to CPA in US) who can help you set it up. DO NOT DO IT by yourself
- For a US based company, I had to do something called "Appostille" which is equivalent of a Notary but for Foreign stuff.
I can recommend the company we used that we still use. We pay them about 20,000 INR per month (about $250/Month) for a team of roughly 15 developers and they do all the setup, taxes, payroll, filings etc etc. PM me if anyone is interested.