The combination of "no personal risk whatsoever, minimal funds/risk coverage, maximal profit extraction" doesn't lend itself well to places with basic regulations.
Capital investments in Europe are definitely not as easy to obtain as in the US for various economic, cultural, and historic reasons, which all led to some pretty weird laws here and there, but the extra week it takes to set up a business isn't the cause.
The reason this all took so long and was so expensive is simple. As the author states:
> I wanted real limited liability
They wanted two different companies with different setups to get out of having to save up the funds or find investors while also paying the least amount of tax possible. They set up a two-company system with all the risk in one and all the earnings in the other. It's like one of those tax dodging schemes the multinationals like, except within a single country. That comes with overhead.
Funnily enough, they then end with:
> Which leaves the only real question. Why 25,000 at all? It is my company and my risk.
Weird to think it would be their own risk if they spend so much time, money, and effort setting up a system that explicitly removes all the risk from them.
All of this feels like it was based on a business plan generated by some over-eager AI that tried to optimize to tick as many boxes as possible, ignoring the real-world consequences of those choices.
Is realistic in the Netherlands to try and fulfill all formal paperwork requirements?
In my native Belgian city, outsourcing that be from ~3k€ excluding VAT/year for the very simplest CIT liable structure. That's excluding 409.3€ corporate social security contribution and 148€ provincial tax. That makes for about 300€ ex. VAT before you can start to earn anything at all. Unless you can fulfill all accounting yourself.
The risk of making a mistake and getting hit with a huge fine, as well as all the time wasted on crunching numbers and reading tax code, probably makes it very difficult to justify doing it yourself if you have a profitable business. If you do not make the money you need to make paying an accountant make sense, I think setting up a BV would probably not be the best approach.
Getting things like payslips right (you have to pay yourself a defined minimum wage and that means paying income tax and getting all the payslips correct if you set up a BV) may seem simple, but there's a reason companies pay good money to have that all taken care of. Just simple things like the possibility of a 53 week year can trip up someone who is just starting out.
But at the end of the day, plenty of people do their own paperwork, deliver the taxes themselves, and file the yearly required documents. It's neither impossible nor illegal to do it all yourself, just often unpopular.
If you want to start a business and you don't need to pay for an office or whatever (because you can actually use those 25k for something), you can literally start over night. If you need a proper company that limits your liability, you can literally start in 2 weeks.
[1] https://service.wirtschaft.nrw/unternehmensgruendung/gewerbe...