This is really great news!
We also need a paneuropean banking & tax system and ideally some paneuropean telephony (plus voip) and internet providers.
EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
581–590 of 761 posts
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#582Earlier quoted context omitted.
Various places in Europe already have what amounts to at-will employment. There are exemptions for companies under a certain number of employees (e.g. 25 in Italy). There's a wide use of fixed-term contracts (6/12 months). Many work through agencies, which means they can be "fired" with a few weeks' notice.
Depends a lot on what country, but I think you'll find that the ratio of full-time employee vs contractor/at-will employee in most European countries will look very different from how that ratio looks like in the US (or other similar countries).
Sure, but that's very different from saying that Europeans have would never accept it. It's already happening quite extensively, though not as much as in the US. Europe seems to be 20-40 years behind the US in various economic and social developments, but it's not immune from them.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#583Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a company should be able to register in x days Which EU bureaucrats will fully pass by treating this as "a company should be able to register in x days once the full set of documents has been collected".
Companies are treated like persons legally and while I'm sure there is too much bureaucracy in many places, I'm also sure that there are important documents that should be required. For example to make sure that a company can be held responsible when it breaks the law. There are already enough loopholes to disconnect legal responsibility from profit-taking, and not every company is benign. Sure, if the documents cann…
> For example to make sure that a company can be held responsible when it breaks the law.
In general this has nothing to do with incorporation documents.
If a company unintentionally causes a large amount of damages, the company is going to get wiped out, but then you're just having the judge order the bank to transfer the company's assets to the victims. The owners of the company aren't particularly relevant except insofar as they now own a company whose value has been zeroed out, and they might be the ones to show up in court to argue against that being what should happen.
If the people at a company intentionally cause a large amount of damages, the corporation is irrelevant. If your "corporation" is in the business of stealing catalytic converters and the police come to arrest you, the person with the sawzall in their hands is going to jail, and if that person was hired to do it they're going to be offered a deal to testify against the person who hired them etc. Pointing to your articles of incorporation at that point isn't going to save you. That isn't what LLCs do, actual criminal enterprises will frequently have not listed the true principals on the documents anyway, and the government is going to try to prosecute the perpetrators rather than the patsies on the documents.
There is no real point in making this a burden for honest people. If they're honest then it doesn't matter. If they're not honest then you'd be a fool to trust what they wrote on a form anyway.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#584Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think they mean that the Estonian company they run now has to file tax returns and pay taxes not only to Estonia but also Spain. The company lives in Estonia. Yeah if they are taking income personally locally then that should go to the country of residence, as is normal. But then if what Estonia considers acceptable standards for tax reporting differs from what Spain considers acceptable, or what they consider 'pro…
Indeed, the current state of affairs is rather sad. To employ a regular (non-management) employee in Spain (and it applies anywhere else in Europe), an Estonian company would to at least have a local address, then register and maintain regular contact with several authorities there (chamber of commerce, social administration, tax office). The bureaucratic overhead makes it practically impossible to have employees acr…
It’s somewhat similar in Finland.
This is why I don’t get what the EU brings to the table at all. I’ve considered starting something, never quite yet pulled the trigger, but I may as well do it in the UK because it’s extremely cheap, gives access to a great number of services, and I can do it all in English there.
It’s not like the company itself is going to be queuing at an airport or whatever.
I’ll have to file in Finland for the company anyway then, but I can skip all the stuff about starting an organisation here.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#585Earlier quoted context omitted.
How certain are you of this? I only have anecdata, but when I tried to use a 3rd party agency to hire someone in France, from Ireland I got the process through several layers of management, up to and including the CEO and COO of my American employer, and HR, and legal counsel, only to be warned away in the most emphatic terms by external counsel. They told us of the risk of large fines and jail time in France for exe…
> They told us of the risk of large fines and jail time in France for executives of companies doing this. Just for hiring someone from France?
just for hiring someone in France via a third-party employer of record.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#586Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>If dealing with VAT is a large problem for your business today It's not a problem for me today. It was a big problem when I had no revenue, needed to do all the paperwork, meet ridiculous local accounting requirements connected to selling software in a different currency than my local one, write code, setup licensing, shipping the software to the clients etc. It was a major source of stress and sleepless nights for…
> It's not a problem for me today. It was a big problem when I had no revenue, needed to do all the paperwork, meet ridiculous local accounting requirements connected to selling software in a different currency than my local one, write code, setup licensing, shipping the software to the clients etc. Since this depends mostly on what country you are in/you are setting up the country in, what specific country was this?…
For me it's very stressful to not comply with the regulation on purpose hoping I am too small to not get punished by the authority. It would be easier to just ignore the regulation.
I get this makes me not well predisposed to do business in EU. Thank you for your advice.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#587Earlier quoted context omitted.
So? Countries outside of EU don't always care for human rights or other things we find important. That doesn't mean we shouldn't still aim for the values we stand for.
Global warming is ultimately a global problem. It doesn't matter if you reduce your CO2 emissions if others aren't following.
You are right, it is a global coordination problem. There are two moves: Cooperate (i.e. reduce your CO2 emissions) or Defect (burn baby, burn).
Obviously there are many global actors but we can model it simply as a two-player game: Europe and the-Rest-of-the-World.
Its economic payoff matrix looks something like (oversimplified and with direction only; scale appropriately):
v Europe/RoW --> Cooperate Defect
|-----------------------------------------|
| Cooperate | (0,0) | (-1,0) |
|----------------+-------------+----------|
| Defect | (0,-1) | (-1,-1) |
|-----------------------------------------|
If Europe cooperates and the RoW defects, Europe loses relative economic advantage and our world still burns.
If Europe defects and RoW cooperates, Europe gains relative economic advantage and our world (maybe) still burns.
If Europe defects and RoW defects, nobody gains an economic advantage and our world burns to a RCP8.5 crisp.
Obviously the preferred siutation is everybody cooperating so our world doesn't burn and nobody gains or loses an economic advantage. But the Schelling point is everybody defecting and burning our world to a crisp.
Everyone ought to push for global cooperation; we've all gotta live here and it'd be nice not to burn our only planet. But if Europe cooperates while the rest of the world defects (i.e. the current situation today), you're an idiot.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#588Can't work legally speaking. There has to be a single sponsoring member state. Just sadly how the EU is designed. The only way would be to copy it individually so it is the same in each member state which breaks the purpose of it.
If the EU is saying "we'll make it work", replying "can't work because that's how the EU is designed" doesn't seem like an intelligent response.
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Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#589It's inordinately difficult and expensive to start an LLC or SA in some EU countries. It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. Huge amount of risk and cost on founders and a huge distraction from running a business. I think that EU-Inc _could_ be an improvement, but it needs to avoid the committee laundry list of ideas/requirements/form fields that plagues the EU startup ecosystem. My worry…
> It's even difficult and expensive to _stop_ an LLC and dissolve it. In my experience this is at least as important. Everyone focuses on the process of creating companies, which is now relatively streamlined in many European countries. The real, massive difference between the US and EU is how hard it is to shutdown a company and the legal implications of that. I was shocked at how unreasonably slow and painful it ca…
I've been told by a lawyer that a common sensible step in closing companies in Germany is to first...reseat the company in the UK ... (at least pre-brexit - not sure if things have changed). Think of how bad and expensive the process has to be for this extra step to be worthwhile.
Re: EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
#590Please please tell me it's pronounced "yoink"