Estonian e-residency | Hacker News Reader

Estonian e-residency

e-estonia.com

84 pointsalexpogosian26 comments

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Quite an elaborate tourist program:

https://e-estonia.com/e-residents/apply-2/

1. Fly to Estonia!

...

4. Wait for the results of your background check (max 14 days)

Meanwhile, explore our untouched forests and free-Wifi boasting cafés in historical old towns.

»As we move on to the next phase in spring 2015, it will be possible to apply through Estonian embassies and consular offices around the world.«

Also an elaborate ploy to get everyone's fingerprints in their database.

And iris? Yikes. Disappointment in an otherwise fantastic program...

Can someone help build a flow-chart of determining whether this program is of value to me or not?

I'm a cofounder of a tech/internet startup in country A. I am a citizen of country B. I have no valid work visa in country A so work as an off-shore consultant for my own company, hence no longer a resident there. I am now a digital nomad in South East Asia.

Most valuable things for me:

- Being allowed to apply for visas in other countries from their consulate in a country other than country B (embassies and consulates are slow and painful and I don't like working there while waiting for my passport). Usually I'm allowed to do this in any other "country of residence." Would e-residence count?

- Being able to easily establish a corporate entity and proof of employment paperwork (also expensive and slow and painful in country B) which helps streamline my visa application processes.

Edited to fix some extraneous statements.

Previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8417062 (when the program was announced)

I live in Canada. Is there any advantage for me to establish a corporation in Estonia? Would my income be subject to both Canadian and Estonia taxes?

I believe profits and capital gains from foreign entities are taxable in Canada.

Not sure about the Estonian side: you might only pay corporate taxes, not personal.

Any word on where Estonia plans to go with all this in terms of citizenship/visa, taxation and so on?

Estonian here. The attitude towards the project over here is: "We have have a cool idea which can be easily implemented, so let's see try it out." In essence, no one really knows what might come out of it. As far as I know there has been 16000 sign ups so far of which 63% did it because they would be able to launch a company here. Currently Estonia has approximately 35 000 companies, so this could potentially become very profitable to the country if done right. Assuming the project will hold security-wise, of course.

I think we gave the site the 'ol internet hug :)

This sound interesting though.

all i see is, "Error establishing a database connection"

Oh dear: "Error establishing a database connection"

wordpress error: db

>Error establishing a database connection

All hail e-residency, the newest oxymoron of our times.

I guess this is the smartest tax haven that went live.

I don't think in itself it has any tax benefits. In fact by itself it has few benefits at all: it doesn't confer any kind of residency, legal right to work or conduct business in Estonia, etc.

What it does give you is a standardized ID and login system, which the Estonian government and major businesses (financial institutions, etc.) will be using in the future for identification and authentication. This will make it easier to conduct some kinds of business in Estonia as a non-resident, compared to many countries where it's difficult to get the proper credentials without being a resident (e.g. many Danish institutions use the CPR number and NemID [1] login system, but it's difficult to get one without being a Danish resident). The intent is to remove some of the procedural barriers to conducting business in Estonia, like "can't figure out how to get the bank to let me log in b/c I don't have an Estonian ID #" or "I don't know what to put down on this form that assumes I have an Estonian ID card and ID #". It doesn't give you any new legal rights in Estonia; it's just supposed to make it easier to do business in Estonia as a nonresident, if you're legally able to in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NemID

Yes indeed, there no direct tax benefits.

> But this system is making doing business from Estonia easier > Estonia is very business friendly country - low taxes compare to countries like France

So, it will be much more easier to move your business there and this is good for them.

Many business in France are fiscally in Luxembourg for tax reasons and on my opinion this new Estonia system is like having a second Luxembourg on the French border.

I hope those smart initiatives will help France (and some other heavy tax countries) to reform.

Moreover, reducing paper work is beneficial for any business.

I think the tax benefits are the withholding taxes being non-existent

> E-residency is provided by the government of the Republic of Estonia, but does not bring physical residency or rights of entry to Estonia or EU. E-residency does not entail any residential or citizen rights and cannot be used as a physical identification card or travel document.

A hoax?

Misleading branding maybe, but not quite a hoax. It's just a login system: you get an ID# and a way to authenticate to digital services in Estonia (both the government's, and anyone in the private sector that implements the system). It will be genuinely useful for nonresidents conducting business in Estonia who previously couldn't get Estonian digital credentials, b/c a lot of stuff is easier if you have them (filing online tax returns, logging in to online banking, etc.). But it doesn't come with legal rights, so the "residency" part is a bit misleading.

To be fair I think the idea is to eventually keep adding rights to these certificates.

    "we are moving towards the idea of a country without borders"

I think the nation state, borders, the tax system, voting, what laws you work under and how you interact with the state should all be rethought as we move towards a post scarcity society[0].

Or we could just keep the old system and destroy the planet because, by god, it's good fun for billionaires to hoard all the worlds resources.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

That's the branding, yeah, but I doubt it's too serious. Literally anyone can sign up for an Estonian ID, with some basic background check, so in principle this "country without borders" includes billions of people, at least once they loosen the requirement to physically travel to Estonia (which currently puts a de-facto income/visa filter on it). I suspect Estonia will not grant those billions of people any "hard" rights, like the right to immigrate to Estonia, to work there if not already permitted to work there, to be considered Estonian for legal purposes if not already so considered, etc.

From what I can gather, what they really want is to make it easier for people to set up businesses in Estonia, for good old-fashioned countries-with-borders reasons: they want to improve the Estonian economy and the employment prospects of Estonia's real residents, as a government typically wants to do.

I think we are quite bit away from post-scarcity, just look at the third world where there are quite a bit of scarcity.

Unnecessarily. That's kind of the point.

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