[EU] Chapter creation as NGO

[Ari Jolma]

Hi,

It seems to me that many European or even global societies organize 
themselves in European tax havens, which include Switzerland, Luxemburg, 
Belgium, Austria, etc (this is a partial list from wikipedia).

In Finland we have the local committee as a legal society, which is tax 
free as long as we don't do anything that looks like business to the tax 
collector. Collecting money for activities and even paying salaries is 
usually ok. We don't have to report to the tax collector unless we do 
business - but what is business is again somewhat fuzzy.

Best,

Ari


11.01.2017, 11:06, María Arias de Reyna kirjoitti:
> 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.
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