[EU] Chapter creation as NGO

[María Arias de Reyna]

Hi,

Context: We should have some kind of legal form on the EU Chapter so
we can have access to subsidies, handle money and lobby.

So I have been asking around. And Spain has become a bad place to do this.

The process to create organizations is quite simple and straight
forward, I just need two Spanish persons more and write some rules
about how we will work. In Spanish (which can be easily translatable,
I'm not worried about that).

But now if we have money on our bank account, we will have to pay
taxes yearly:
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impuesto_de_sociedades_(Espa%C3%B1a)

It should not be a high tax (depends on what we do), but it is not pretty.

Before, you could have small amounts in the bank without having to pay
taxes, but they rewrote the law and removed that part. Donations,
subventions and subscriptions are exempt, but if we organize for
example a FOSS4G-EU and sell tickets, we will have to pay taxes for that.
(And we should be very careful about subventions, donations and
subscriptions, because depending on how we do it we may have to pay
taxes too). We will also have to be very careful and detailed on how we
spend the money to prove we are non-lucrative. If the Tax Agency
suspects that we are paying higher diets for travelling than what they
think is needed then we may get fines, for example.

(Yes, they don't know where else they can tax or fine us...)

So unless you have similar issues, I guess Spain is not pretty for
creating the European Chapter. If you have similar taxes, then Spain
makes it very easy to create and maintain, although we will have to
pay someone to take care of all this bureaucratic details.

Regards,
María.