> 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".
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".
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 cannot be acquired in X days for other reasons, that would undermine the tagline.
But I don't think that's the main risk.
Let's not forget that some requirements make sense.
In Germany, the government recently decided that some minor applications to local governments must be answered within X days or else are automatically approved.
But "minor" is important here... great for a small business that applies for a permit to renovate there outdoor seatings or whatever.
I wouldn't want for company foundings to be auto-approved without submitting the legally required documents.
My point is that this move will not happen. I don't believe EU can overcome a huge and extremely motivated army of bureaucrats.
What, exactly, do you mean with "EU move"?
I guess technically it's a "European Commission" move, but overall it's a European and EU move, unless "move" has some specific meaning to you.
That being said, everything about the process is annoying and you always have the feeling that you're doing something wrong or forgetting something. Together with some ridiculously slow processing times, it's the perfect combination to frustrate you and I'm sure it ultimately reduces innovation.
But in reality, getting all the paperwork together is probably a couple of hours of work. You can buy services that do it for you for a couple of hundred Euros.
bank (loans), immigration and investors can be interested, but their interests are not covering every corporation out there.
Kind of like fizzbuzz, just something really simple and most basic to get rid of the "easy scams" and so on.
Edit: So "easy scams" are probably the wrong word, I initially wrote "riffraff" because in my mothertoungue that isn't so... disparaging, but what I meant was that it's used as "bare minimum filter" basically.
Done.
Obviously, having a credible plan helps if you try to convince banks to loan you money or any such thing, but the act of registering a company requires no such thing.
Why would the government need a business plan?
It's none of their business what you want to do with your company besides a general description as "software development" or "consulting services" or whatever.
https://www.existenzgruendungsportal.de/Navigation/DE/So-geh...
There are plenty of European member states that want the ability to control very precisely what you do with "your company". You want to call yourself "a software engineer"? Ooops...
In the EU it seems particularly the German-speaking countries are borderline obsessed with a) titles, and b) whom may use those titles. See, for instance, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34096464
There is nothing borderline about that - the German cultural space (including very much the countries of former Habsburg Empire) is still completely obsessed with titles and formal positions despite many of them losing any practical importance in modern times.
Exhibit A: https://www.ctvnews.ca/montreal/article/battery-facility-acc...
"Following regulation" sounds great until it's revealed that corporate lobbyists have been helping (co-)write regulations to make sure that fair competition is quashed.
This is the problem. Let me pivot. Let me fail. Let my investors (including myself) lose time and money in bad ideas.
All the bureaucracy in the world didn’t stop Wirecard, but it sure as heck demotivated people from trying something new in Germany.
This is the reason Germany hates small companies. Germany wants you to be a sole trader with no liability shield.
Some people hack the system by registering a company in another EU state such as Lithuania.
While for some cases there is room for abuse (like Amazon Kindle eBooks are sold to Germany by a company situated in Luxembourg, while only selling via amazon.de to audience with German residency) However my employer is a Dutch B.V. with headquarters in Germany, thus they avoid having to form a board with works council representatives as a German GmbH (or AG) of comparable size would require.
So if the executives and board meetings and books and records are strategically located in one country and most of the business operations are in a second, it's valid and probably even required for the business to have its tax residence in the first country rather than the second.
It may very well have a permanent establishment and therefore some tax obligations in the second country, but that's different from the second country being the primary tax residence.
> However my employer is a Dutch B.V. with headquarters in Germany, thus they avoid having to form a board with works council representatives as a German GmbH (or AG) of comparable size would require.
Workers rights are being unified, but that's a long complex process, as work cultures vary a lot and most companies fear German-style code termination, while it's an uphill battle to weaken it in Germany, thus it remains in national law's responsibility.
And to be clear:
a) works council exists with all normal rights, only they don't have board seats, which can be quite powerful, especially in public companies where one might form alliances with independent share holders. In the case here it's a 100% subsidiary of an American corporation, so they get their will one way or the other, board members may only delay
b) I am somewhat priviligedge as I am no simply replicable conveyor belt worker, but somewhat specialized engineer
c) I'm currently on garden leave period after 18 years in the company (incl acquisitions) due to a reduction, where works council produced a quite nice exit for me, so the only time I needed it, it worked well. But then I am somewhat privileged over others, making it hard to generalize.
Isn't this type of generosity the exact reason why German companies are making restructuring and moving jobs abroad where they don't have workers councils and such generous exit packages?
Like I'm sure it worked well for you now, but I'm wondering how sustainable this is for German companies going forward, in a more competitive business-cutthroat globalized world, that has less and less barriers for capital and trade.
It's also interesting how it plays together with social benefits: As it is hard to fire people, hire&fire isn't an approach, thus companies keep workers longer during a downturn, thus when they let go there is more budget for social security.
Also the effects of having works council representatives on the board might lead to decisions not tied to the quarterly results, but long-term stability.
This all of course makes it harder to do experiments, build up a business unit to see if an idea might work ...
As a worker it is quite good and the model worked quite well for large parts of the 20th century. With global competition (for many jobs exact location doesn't matter) it could be a factor which plays a role in being late with digital stuff.
You're reiterating the pros of why it's been good SO FAR, but you don't drive on the road by looking in the rearview mirror, if you get what I mean.
My take is that the german government will have to do another "agenda 2010" row of cuts to union and labor rights, if it wishes to keep jobs in the country and remain a competitive export economy, hell, even Switzerland has significantly less labor rights than Germany. Not saying that's a good thing, but it seems like that's one of the necessary evils if you want to have a growing economy, and not turn into Italy or France.
If you want to employ people, you need to file gratuitously obnoxious paperwork, but it’s still automatic.
What’s the actual problem? Why should it be harder?
Some states like California dislike small businesses in that they charge $800/year. But that’s pretty much it.
Marx won. You should learn how easy it is to fire an employee in a software development company in Germany.
(spoiler: almost impossible)
I believe it was just a crazy idea that was submitted recently.
The closest real thing is 75 VwGO which requires a decision in 3 months. The immigration office has been failing to meet that requirement for years with few consequences, because enforcing that right is expensive and takes even longer.
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.
Only having experience in the US, I can tell you conclusively that if the company states it's job is to make and promote poison for untrained people to spray everywhere, let's call it "CircleHeavenward" for example, and they successfully convince enough people to buy and use it, but then it's found they knowingly told people to spray it unsafely and knew it would kill millions of people but his it, and millions of the customers neighbors are now dying, absolutely nothing will be done. Because they're a successful corporation and therefore completely immune to any responsibility for any outright criminal activity. Doubly so it they can successfully claim more than one person was involved in carrying out that criminal activity, and therefore the responsibility for it is distributed.
A lot of stuff is e.g. you have an old study showing that glyphosate causes cancer in mice in amounts orders of magnitude higher than typical human exposure. Plaintiffs are going to claim that means they knew it was dangerous, and maybe that's even enough to win their lawsuit. But lots of things cause cancer in mice in excessive amounts. Can you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew it would cause cancer in humans in ordinary amounts? If not then you don't have enough to put them in prison. Also, which "them" is it? If you want a person, the actually guilty party is typically not the CEO, it's a middle manager who made the decision three decades ago and is now a retired non-billionaire. If you collected enough evidence then you could potentially put a middle class grandpa in prison for it. The actual reason this doesn't often happen isn't that corporations are rich.
But also, what does this have to do with the bureaucracy involved in entity formation? Is your theory that making it harder to start a small business would somehow have made it more likely for Monsanto to be prosecuted for whatever they did? How?