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Comment by osmianski | Hacker News Reader

What exactly "startup-friendly tax regime" does Singapore have and India doesn't?

https://inc42.com/features/the-curse-of-angel-tax-travelkhan...

In addition to incidents like these, corruption is widespread in India. Exports qualify for GST exemption or refund, but in practice refunds are hard to get (at least without a 5% or more bribe).

Scary. Tells you about what a state drunk on its power can do; no wonder India is so big on 'digital transactions' (pushed, interestingly, by the likes of USAID).

Unnecessarily political comment. That too when the Angel Tax, started by the previous government in 2012 (to curb money laundering) (source: https://m.economictimes.com/news/economy/finance/et-in-the-c...), and was ended by this government in 2019 (source: https://techcrunch.com/2019/08/23/india-angel-tax/).

Angel Tax was not 'ended'. There are still many conditions under which it is still applicable, governing both who can invest in a startup and how the startup can spend its money. [1]

A bigger issue which is still applicable today is that long term capital gains tax on startups and other unlisted companies is still 28.5%, while for listed stocks it is 10%. [2]

There are some exemptions announced today for foreign investments until 2024 with a lock-in period of 3 years. [3]

[1] https://yourstory.com/2019/08/angel-tax-startups-angel-inves...

[2] https://www.business-standard.com/article/companies/higher-l...

[3] https://www.livemint.com/budget/news/budget-2020-full-text-o...

5% of how much, though? how much more than 5%?

5% (up to 15%) of the amount to be refunded, which for exporters is all of their GST, which can be up to 28% of the gross value of goods sold.

Just a twitter search for "GST refund bribe" will show a lot of examples.

I used to run a startup in Singapore, and 0% corporate tax for the first 3 years, 0% capital gains tax, and 0% income tax on local dividends was a pretty sweet deal. (I'm not sure what the current corp tax rates are, but AFAIK the latter two are unchanged.)

I think Singapore does not apply capital gains tax for one. Has a simple corporate tax slab of %17 unlike India.

Another plus point is being able to keep profits in SGD as opposed to INR (which depreciates by 5% per year).

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