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Comment by aeden | Hacker News Reader

Slightly OT, but countries tend to dislike this brave new world where they cannot obviously and clearly collect taxes on business owners that reside in their country. It is going to be a tough day if the other shoe drops on this. No idea what it will look like if it happens though.

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There exist some ways to abusively structure international tax affairs. That isn't what Atlas is about -- we help honest businesspeople get on a sound and legally compliant footing.

You would not even believe how many weeks of my life I've spent the last ten years paying every cent I owe in Japan and the United States. Like every other business owner, I kvetch a bit about the rates, but I pay my taxes on time and in full because laws are laws.

We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves. (Letting folks across the globe participate on equal and solid footing in the US market tends to increase value created worldwide, which is awesome, and also increases US tax collection at the margin.)

> We want to eliminate the stupid value-destroying busywork of complying with taxes, not taxes themselves.

Oh yes! Italy was like that: it's not so much the taxes themselves, it's all the extraneous BS that surrounds them that takes so much time to deal with.

Having a U.S. based business serve as a sort of global corporate registry broker will also make it extremely easy for U.S. law enforcement to subpoena information that would otherwise be located in less cooperative jurisdictions (or in jurisdictions that are cooperative but just require a lot of paperwork and MLATs and so forth), so I can't imagine you'll have too much trouble with them.

I just have a hard time seeing how "going international" is going to be easier. Suddenly you have to deal with a completely foreign tax system and people who are well versed in international tax laws in your own jurisdiction. A lot of people can't start companies abroad without considering controlled foreign company rules, double taxation agreements, permanent establishment etc.

It's not necessarily going to be easier, but if your business plans to sell primarily to the US market and wants to accept credit card payments then incorporating in the US with a US bank account may be easier than trying to do so from many other countries. If on the other hand you are mostly planning on addressing your local market then a US based entity may make things more complicated for no reason. I think Atlas is targeted at the former.

I don't mind the money-cost. It's the time-cost: I need to take a week of vacation just to file taxes. Yes, I could pay someone to do it for me. No, I can't find anyone I trust to do it right.

We should have gone VAT-only (or VAT-mostly with some land and excise taxes thrown in) a long time ago. Perhaps we finally will.

How does making it easier to incorporate a business make it easier to evade taxes than, say, it is for an individual to do under-the-table services/consulting and not pay income tax?

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