On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:03:03AM +0100, Gabriele Bartolini wrote:
> Ciao Magnus,
>
> I don't know if we can easily do that. I don't know if it's just in Sweden
> > or if it's a EU-wide thing, but I think it's EU-wide. But i you cannot
> > prove that you are a legal organisation as well, you end up basically
> > being
> > employed by PGEU in this case, which means that we have to pay a bunch of
> > taxes and stuff. And the amount of paperwork to deal with is just
> > insane...
>
>
> I guess it all depends on international agreements between the contributor's
> country (and jurisdicial form) and Postgres Europe's country, in this case
> France.
Yes. But I think the rules are reasonably similar across europe these days
- though of course not identical. I can only speak from the perspective of
the Swedish rules, which I know.
> I would assume that PGEU gathers money from sponsorships and decides how to
> spend that money (which is a different issue). Buying code from developers
> could be an activity. I would assume that in EU, VAT is not an issue. I do
The question is if you get treated as a company or as an individual. if you
are treated as a company, VAT is very much an issue. Unless both ends of
the transaction can provide the other one with a registered VAT number, you
have to pay VAT on the transaction.
> not know with Russia, but I assume that taxes should be paid by each
> contributors individually at the end of the year - not on the single
> contract. In any case, a professional advisor is needed.
That is for the employees tax, not the employers tax. The big question is:
do you get treated as an employee.
Having the contributor in this case being registered as his own company
("sole merchant") removes the uncertainty.
But as you say, we'd need professional advice before we say what we *can*
do. I'm just saying it may be a lot less easy than it seems.
> In general PGEU could commission a feature development to a developer or a
> group (again, I do not want to consider for the moment the way to handle
> this - which is a completely different problem), the developer invoices
> PGEU, PGEU pays. :)
Yes, this is extremely straight-forward if said developer is registered as
a company...
I'll just snip the other ideas which are good, but which reallyi is
something for the future :-)
//Magnus
