Comment by candiddevmike
2 years ago
Wherever the CEO/founder lives. You can always move the company, better to just get something formed and worry about optimizing for taxes later. Pay folks as contractors and you don't have to worry about having a presence in their country.
I am actually not trying to optimize for taxes but rather for low overhead and not spending too much time managing the company but rather building a great product.
In my experience, things aren't that simple. For example, if you start a company in Country A but you are the main decision maker and live in Country B, then Country B may try to claim primary taxation of the company based on the fact that they consider the company being 'effectively run' from inside their borders despite your incorporation. And you aren't going to read about this kind of stuff on forums because it is very situation specific.
Multi-country taxation is very complicated. You can get a general idea from asking online, but then you REALLY need to talk to an expert in those specific countries unless your business is just so small that the governments involved would never care.
If you don't want to do that, the best/simplest situation is almost certainly incorporating in the place where the founders actually live permanently.
> If you don't want to do that, the best/simplest situation is almost certainly incorporating in the place where the founders actually live permanently.
In general, I strongly agree.
In the particular case, however, there could be aspects that speak against it. Planing to have employees from another country might be such an aspect. If your company resides in country A and wants to employ someone from a country B, there are typically three options, but what is actually possible and which rules apply depents on the actual regulation in both countries: a) The easiest is as a contractor. But this might not be legal, if the work-relation has the characteristics of an employment. b) The person from country B gets an employment contract of the company in country A, but is despatched to country B. This often requires that the person has a work visa for country A (unless inside the EU for EU citizens). c) The company establishes a subsidiary company in country B that employs the person.
The first thing I would do is seeking for advise from your local chambers of commerce and then from the foreign chambers of commerce of the countries you are planning to employ people from.
As the post states, the idea is to hire / contract a number of people around the world. I don't think it would be easy to argue that that the company effectively operates from country A if most of the work is done by people in countries B..Z.
IANAL, of course.
3 replies →
unfortunately, this is bad maths.
Open the company anywhere the founder(s) is/are. Just pick a reasonable location if you have many options.
The reasons being that you should never run a business without accounting and legal advice, so you will have someone take care of it for you, and the cost will always cover the risk of doing it yourself poorly.
And when you’re successful, you can always hire more legal/accounting or relocate.
I’ll conclude a bit more harshly: If you’re somehow relying on the costs of operations to balance the success of your company, you might as well just reconsider.