also sprach Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org> [2014-04-14 23:20 +0200]:
> - Donations can go through the existing Debian trusted non-profit
> organisations, and be paid to any supplier (including a temporary
> entity for a conference)
It is my understanding that FFIS will not transfer money without an
existing paper audit trail, which can make things incredibly hard
and lose us time.
> - Corporate taxes are usually only relevant if you make a profit
> (which a special-purpose entity can avoid)
Yes, this is true, and only in the excess of 30k €/year anyway.
> - Sales taxes (VAT) are often only required if the turnover is
> beyond some threshold (but this can easily be reached if much
> money is passed through for DebConf)
Sales tax is the main concern and we would be above the limit of
100k €. FFIS could only solve this for us if they became the
contractual partner for everything, i.e. their board members signed
the contract with Heidelberg. I am not led to believe this would be
a good idea of will even happen.
also sprach Richard Hartmann <richih.mailinglist@gmail.com> [2014-04-14 23:24 +0200]:
> For completeness' sake, registering a Limited in Germany
> (non-profit or for-profit) requires you to pony up at least 25.000
> € in advance. This is why insurance is cheaper.
As stated on the wiki page, you can do so with 1 €, but then often
your contractual partners will want to see additional securities on
larger contracts.
Such a registered company requires a lot more controlling, auditing,
book keeping and tax work than a Verein, where we'll do these things
anyway, but in a "lite" version.
also sprach Moray Allan <moray@sermisy.org> [2014-04-14 23:47 +0200]:
> For completeness: presumably one could register a limited company
> in a more efficient EU jurisdiction and take advantage of the
> single market.
We thought about this and remain open to the idea of a Debian Europe
entity, but here are a few points:
1. Tax law is national and to my knowledge, non-profit status is
too. While the "European non-profit association" has been
planned for a very long time, it still does not exist. So there
are two aspects here:
a. with the goal being to avoid having to pay sales tax on
turnover, you'd need tax-exemption either in every country
where the association should be active, or you need
tax-exemption in one country even if you organise events
beyond the border. The latter is unlikely, because tax
exemption is bound to the idea that you are otherwise
benefitting the local public (who then benefit less due to
lower tax income). The former just sounds like a nightmare.
b. non-profit is also about receiving donations and in that
case, the relevant jurisdiction is that of the donor, not
the association. Sure, we can and will use debian.ch,
debian.fr, debian.uk to receive donations in/from those
countries, but these may well have difficulties sending the
tax-free money across the border, and they also cannot issue
tax-relevant receipts to donors outside of their countries.
2. There could be problems with contractual partners. For
instance, the youth hostel in Heidelberg probably could deal
with a British Ltd., but I don't know what conditions they want
(e.g. forward payment). With a German entity, they are happy to
deliver services and receive payment afterwards, at least it
was never mentioned to me to be otherwise.
3. You write of a "more efficient EU jurisdiction", but I don't
really see how there could be one. Of course, Germany suffers
from the prejudiced view that it's the most bureaucratic state
in the world, but is it, really? I've been involved with
multiple non-profits and it's really not bad — at least once
you know the way it's supposed to work. I have a Ltd. in
Ireland too and boy, that was the most complex thing to get
right… until I knew how to do it.
While we have some knowledge and experience with German law and
tax law in the DC15 team, we have much less experience with
European law or that of any other legislation. This can be
acquired, but it is to be assumed that a European ("wider")
entity would be more complex to run. Are the benefits worth
those costs?
So, all in all, if there were a truly European non-profit
association entity, that would be the logical choice and I'd be all
for it. But while that's not the case, we should probably stick to
what we know, rather than trying to fit in with the myriad of
legislations around, all at once.
--
.''`. martin f. krafft <madduck@debconf.org>
: :' : DebConf orga team
`. `'`
`- DebConf14: Portland, OR, USA: http://debconf14.debconf.org
DebConf15: Heidelberg, Germany
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