As an example, the latest hooplah around enterprise taxation is related to using company cars during private time. If an employer does not allow to use company cars for private purposes, then they will be marked as such in a public registry. If you have a feeling that your neighbor is using his company car outside of work, you can check it and report it to the TCB: http://www.err.ee/643218/erasoiduks-tooauto-kasutaja-saab-na... But if the company car is not registered as such, then you will have to pay fringe benefits tax 1,96 EUR per engine kW per month for newer cars and 1,47 EUR per engine kW per month for cars older than 5 years.
As an exercise to the reader, think about how flat taxation per kW affects companies with electric cars.
In practice nobody really monitors these things and many do abuse the system to cater for themselves etc. However if you find yourself an enemy who will report you (even just on suspicion), then you better have a convincing case for the tax authority and/or judge as your accounting gets audited.
There are a bunch of special benefit rules that can be used for lawful cost savings though. There are lawful ways to split car costs with company money, there are lawful ways to get a tax-free daily allowance if you're traveling for business, limited to some X days per month.
In general I think the company tax rates are low enough to do everything lawfully. Taking out profits as an owner incurs a 20% income tax to the company and zero taxes to the individual. In addition, if you've taken out profits before, then the company income tax is 14%, up to the amount that equals the average of the last 3 years. So if you take out similar profits on a regular basis, the tax rate is only 14% on everything.
As I understood it, this is only so for distributing profits to legal entities. If you're distributing to a private person, the private person will have to pay a new 7% income tax which sums up to a total of about 20%. This of course only matters if the private person is tax resident in Estonia.
I find the PwC tax alerts very informative to be kept up to date on the tax laws in Estonia: https://www.pwc.com/ee/en/press-room/tax-alerts/estonian-tax...
I hadn't seen any mention of the new 7% individual rate in any newspaper articles or even accounting firm articles. I now inspected the actual income tax law [1], and sure enough the 7% clause is there.
One one hand this means a slight net tax increase to 20.02% [2], on the other hand if the total individual income is less than 25200€/year then a part of that 7% will be returned.
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[1] Unfortunately not yet translated to English https://www.riigiteataja.ee/akt/107072017022
[2] 100 * 0.86 * 0.93 = 79.98