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Comment by anonzzzies | Hacker News Reader

I do not know an EU or Asian country that doesn’t have a similar paperwork misery; I had a company in DE and in many others; you won’t survive in Spain as SL if you are small and follow the rules either. So literally no one does. No different in DE. We never got fined or even reprimanded. Largest fine in DE we got was for charging the wrong VAT for some items and that was not really that bad compared to all the tax breaks we got.

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In Romania it's so bad that there are companies who will handle everything for you, even if technically the chamber of commerce has a digital interface as well. Everything is handled online and you get digitally signed papers in a reasonable amount of time.

This is probably the solution, an EU-wide company that has local offshoots and can handle the bureaucracy for a fee.

When there is an industry offering workarounds-as-a-service, then it is time for legal reform.

Setting up a business in the UK is a breeze. It takes 30 minutes, costs 20 quid and it's all done online. I'd go so far as to say the UK is the friendliest place in the world for small businesses (as long as you don't have a physical location, because business rates are incredibly regressive and backwards)

A friend of mine in Iceland literally just set up a UK ltd company today - I'm a shareholder, took 5 minutes to verify my identity - by linking it to my existing companies house account.

Not EU though. But yes, easy, I had one there.

As far as I know, incorporating a BV in the Netherlands can be done in 1-2 weeks, with a lot of less pain. Many services are integrated and available online.

I don't think you've lived in many EU or Asian countries... While incorporation sucks in France, Spain, and Germany, in most North European countries, East European countries, and even in most Balkan countries, it's a breeze (when compared to Germany).

Incorporation might be easy in some places but then getting a bank account for the company is hard if you or some of other shareholders don't live there; then you still have nothing useful and a lot of paperwork to go.

That's completely irrelevant to the discussion. Creating a bank account as a non-resident is even in the US not that straight forward.

Let me guess, you're German? Germans will say they're not very patriotic, but really the way German patriotism manifests is a resistance to outside criticism paired with a stubborn insistence that it's worse in other countries.

Estonia makes it very easy.

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