Notaries should not exist, and could be replaced by a simple website.
It's all incredibly tedious and slow, and there are lots of reoccurring work and fees. Closing a company takes 2-3 years too, even if there are no irregularities.
From my point of view there are also not many fees and none of them are recurring. IIRC, you have to pay the notary, the registry and the tax office for services rendered. Once you are registered, there are other fees, e.g. IHK (trade association) membership or insurances, but that is not part of the registration, that is cost of doing business.
Liquidation on the other hand takes 12 month (a transitory period required by law) and a few weeks before and after the liquidation for notary appointments. That's it. All in all it took maybe 18 month from decision point to deletion from the registry and the main part of the extra 6 month was deliberation what needed to be done before the transition started.
The relevant keywords for research are "Vorratsgesellschaft" or "Mantelgesellschaft". The former are empty companies with no business activity, the latter are older companies with business history but inactive now. Mantelgesellschaften are nice because they bring a credit history along making stuff like leasing easier but cause a little bit more effort at time of purchase.
Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!
This is basically wrong. They moved the budgets to different departments, where it made more sense. And it actually does move on..slowly. It's basically a living example of too many technical debts and the pains of federalism gone wrong.
> Soon you'll be able to use a credit card in most shops even!
Real credit cards are very uncommon in Germany. Debit cards on the other hand are working well everywhere, even in small shops (since the pandemia to be fair).
Not yet. There still exist plenty of cash-only places. In my neighborhood (P-Berg, Berlin) both nearest restaurant and nearest coffee shop are cash-only.
Not sure where you people live, but this myth has to stop, eventually. I can literally count on one hand the n. of shops NOT accepting cards - it's most of the times shops which, I guess, use cash to have flexibility in their accountings :)
The bigger mystery is why stores in some other countries are happy to have a payment method chosen by the customer eat into their profit.
But actually a lot don't, and when you try to pay, even contactless, with a non-Girocard, it won't work.
Visa and Mastercard don't magically let you on their network because you have a card machine.
In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.
Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.
Sorry to hear it's still the same.
We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.
The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.
Being free to dodge the tax man is incredibly valuable for small business and individuals in Germany as a lot of wealth is built on tax fraud. That's the kind of privacy people mean.
Germany has 80+ million people. Having nobody on Instagram/Tiktok would be unthinkable.
However, historically speaking, this hesitation to have privacy over "convenience" is implemented still everywhere.
You can't just minimize it with "people want to evade tax", although it's also true.
The people who are very vocal about (data) privacy in Germany (which are quite some people, though not all) indeed typically try to avoid such services.
And there's a difference between being vocal and actually walking the walk and doing anything about it.
Exactly.
This is the eperience from two dicatorships on German soil in the 20th century of which one ended less than 35 years ago (many of its crimes still have not been prosecuted). There still exist lots of contemporary witnesses who can tell you what being potentially be surveilled means in the day-to-day life.
That's some level of f** up.
No wonder that cash is the only accepted payment method in a world that tries at all costs to sneak into your private stuff.
In comparison to the NSDAP and SED, I think calling the 15 years of CDU government under Helmut Kohl (which actually ended a bit over 25 years ago) a dictatorship is a bit too harsh... /s
I fixed my mistake. :-)
East Germany (ended in 1990), Third Reich (ended in 1945), German Monarchy (ended in 1918)
At the same time, they had an early form of mobile Internet since they year 2000 (when most of the West didn't have internet at all, let alone mobile internet): https://www.wired.com/2000/06/its-a-wireless-world-in-japan/
Japan is ranked 4th/20th vs Germany's 23th/35th for mobile/fixed internet speed, so much better overall (and anecdotal evidence is that internet in Germany's countryside is rock bottom).
So Japan rather seems to me to _want_ to do their own thing (at least when it comes to preference for cash, although I agree that still faxing things is strange), compared to Germany which _cannot_, for various reasons.
[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...
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It's our failed state, so what do you expect?
In practice, it is not possible because you need to register to a local tax office of the worker. Spanish employee -> need to register your company with the Spanish tax office.
Good luck unless you can afford expensive legal services that do this for you. Does not make a sense unless you are planning to hire in quantity (>20 workers).
The alternative is that every remote worker is a subcontractor and takes care of their own taxes.
In Germany the pension insurance (DRV) will come around after a few years and demand a six digit figure from both your company and the employee, plus interest. You can also end up with criminal charges filed against you.