How to found a company in Germany: 14 "easy" steps and lots of pain

Please add a link for people relying on this info.

Theoretically, yes.

Practically, not anymore: there are block posts on main roads into Germany and they check passports.

"Folks, you can travel outside of Germany for sure, just avoid the police, the border authorities and don't get caught."

Germany's head of state was involved in the biggest financial scandal of its existence and forgave a corrupt bank that stole millions of taxes just a few years before going into office.

corruption is spreading like a plague with no consequence in sight for anyone involved.

This sounds like all of you are living in Berlin, which is known as "failed state" to the rest of Germany. ;-)

It varies form city to city, I live in one that I'd say is an exception on the positive side: Most clerks in the various offices are actually helpful and even giving you hints. I had to renew my passport in January and got an appointment the next day. I got the appointment online(!) in Germany(!!). Passport could be collected 4 weeks later. Meanwhile an ex-colleague who lives in Berlin had to wrestle with his nearest office to even get an appointment for a passport renewal, then gave up and made an appointment with the office in the neighboring district, where it was still a 4 weeks wait. He told me there are districts where it takes up to 6 months.

I guess if you want pain and suffering, move to Berlin. :o)

Yes, bureaucrats can act as gatekeepers for things that you are legally entitled to, and create various bureaucratic hurdles. It's usually mere thoroughness, sometimes incompetence, and if you cross them, vindictiveness.

I was told more than once by very knowledgeable people that if you anger a case worker, they can and will make your life hard by nitpicking every little detail and asking for as many documents as they can.

This happens for example if you get angry at their incompetence, or if you sue them for inaction (although in Berlin they see it as normal business by now).

I guess that depends on the city and the procedure, but I had to replace my DNI last summer and it took me less than 30 minutes, and they gave me the new one on the spot.

In comparison I also had to renew my Japanese foreign card and later my ID card, and both procedures were a royal PITA, and in both cases I had to wait a month to get the new card.

The impression I got from the last time I was in Germany (some ~7 years ago), there's a going concern among at least some people that a certain ethnicity of immigrants is "taking over". This might be a pearl-clutching minority, or I may have completely misread the situation.

i wonder how much of the "incompetence" is really just under-staffing, and how much is the public servants being paid to essentially do little/no work.

Are you highly educated?

My father has only a certificate and no degree or anything like that.

It took him 20 years to get citizenship. We came 3 years after he come here and we all became citizens together.

My friends whose parents were doctors or had masters degree would get their GC and citizenships in like 5 years.

Being a white, middle-aged, middle-class male in America I can say I have no productive things to say about how my local, state, or federal government has benefitted myself or my family beyond the things everyone else also benefits from. I don’t get assistance for anything, I don’t get breaks on anything, no free services, etc.

If your first reaction to this is “well you don’t need anything!” you must be one of the people that was astonished at how the 2016 election went.

No I didn’t vote for the guy and I hope he loses this time.

Why do US people keep trying to route control of major parts of their life through a system where ..

Because sometimes you don't have a say, or you don't expect to use it. No politician ever campaigned on making the lines at the DMV move faster. But we (mostly) all agree you should be required to get a license before you drive. Most Americans drive, and few have chose to route this "major part of their life" away from the DMV.

Immigration process (as this thread illustrates) sucks. It's also not a process used by voters.

The process to apply for welfare in most parts of the US sucks, but the actual welfare is valuable. People think by making it harder, it will instead result in people who are less reliant upon it. Welfare recipients are a huge political target constantly. They're the individuals who are "actively hated" in this example, and they're entirely dependent on the system in that moment, because thats how misfortune works.

Many cities making construction permits hard to get, because local residents don't want their neighborhood changing, so they petition local politicians to make the process slower/harder/more-expensive. In this example they "hate" the new construction.

If you're not a high schooler and you're applying to a state-funded university, the process to prove you're a local resident can be surprisingly complicated. This is because it's designed for high school students and all the edge cases are optimized to avoid accidentally providing tax-subsidized "in-state" tuition to an out-of-state resident. For example, I wanted to take a for-fun class at a local university and because I didn't have a local high school to vouch for my residency, I needed to provide (among other things) 50+ pages of tax documents. It took 2 semesters (1y) to prove I lived in the state, and the minimum amount of time you need to live in-state is 1 year.

People who live their life in the "happy-path" case often don't deal with the government, and don't understand the struggle of these edge cases. Plenty of activities require the government. No way around it. Sometimes, people who think "small government" is the solution end up making those processes terrible by making it understaffed or convoluted to "avoid waste".

In the US, there is a path for PhD holders, to my knowledge, it's called EB-2.

I don’t like to both sides many things but immigration is definitely one case. The system is broken on purpose because US agriculture, construction, and many other labor intensive trades can’t operate profitably without a migrant labor underclass. Nobody wants to fix this. Not Democrats, not Republicans.

Add to that the fact that the Republicans now have a second reason not to fix immigration: they can’t run on it if it’s not broken.

If Trump gets in again he will do a lot of anti immigration theater for his base but nothing will really change. Democrats won’t fix it either. Someone has to pick berries and trim hedges.

(as a fellow American) They almost certainly meant this as "politicians, or their voters, have some bias/hate against something, so they destroy the bureaucracy that benefits those people".

Eg. Republicans hate taxes, so they defund the IRS (tax collectors), to make it harder for the government to audit tax evasion.

I wasn’t even speaking specifically to immigration, but I can understand why everyone thought that because of who I replied to.

I’m glad you can believe this is true, genuinely. I have hope that maybe this means things will change.

But as a white guy from middle American (in that I lived there for 40 years) who has voted Republican and Democrat and has enough conservative ideas that people are often confused about my political leanings, I can tell you there is some truth to this.

I’ve been in the room more than several hundred times when people who were working in the American bureaucracy openly "decried the horrors of the Mexican invasion ". I will admit the majority of that was my ex’s father but it wasn’t only him. I’m certain he did not make things easier on his Mexican applicants (dmv in his case).

I’ve also heard racial slurs used hundreds of thousands of times, very few people engaging in this voted democrat.

I’m sure there are endless stupid conspiracy theories in progressive echo chambers, I hear them from time to time they are just as silly as republican ones and I would love nothing more the above comment to be correct.

In the end, their experience definitely does not match up with mine and we should all be sad.

I accompanied several friends through the process.

My observation was that by simply changing the view on what is happening and extrapolating how to act based on that one can achieve quite a lot.

I told people the following:

1. The person dealing with you is not there to help you, they are simply executing an act of governance. Rather than wanting them to help you, try to help them close their tickt.

2. You are the type of immigrant people actually want. These popele see lots of drama, lies, heartbreak and hopelessness. If you are pleasant and well prepared they will probably like working on your case since it will not make them feel bad.

3. Things take time. Be as early as possible with everything and realize that there early is a way to speed things up.

Keeping those three things to heart worked very well. That does not make things faster, but it takes a lot of frustration out of the process.

Not myself, but I accompanied my wife every time, and she’s now a permanent resident. The last time we just wanted to extend her temporary residence permit, they even advised us that we have no reason to do that and could just apply for permanent residence (which we then did).

Waiting times are annoying, but that is because of an overloaded system, everything else was pretty painless.

Some of the people involved can also be extremely unpleasant to deal with, even if you speak German.

Isn't this just German culture, though? I had that experience just buying groceries and going through the checkout line!

It’s the same people that get allocated tasks generated in those processes. They even get shifted between departments.

It does not really help to have separate queues if those are served by the same worker.

Syria, Brexit, covid, Ukraine. At this point they should have adapted.

Yes, the country needs to be both competent and strongly willing to court new comers and permanent residents in the first place.

On your experience, it really feels like a PITA. It won't help, but Japan and France are basically the same. You'll see procedures listed as typically taking 2~3 months, check back every now and then, and low and behold a year and half later you have absolutely no idea of what's going on, if your submission has been forgotten or is contentious. There's no recourse as long as you haven't been refused, so it's limbo until something happens.

People are right to bitch about these lengthy and utterly frustrating procedures, I just don't see a way out of it short of being rich, famous or finding a loophole that lets you force a government agency do something in a timely manner without getting a target on your back.

To note, France had much progress in the last decades, in that bullshit requirements were made illegal a few years ago. At least you can check everything needed on an official site and not be subjected to petty additional requirements when dealing with the local entity (yes, that was a thing, probably to make it extra hard for specific portions of the population to properly file procedures)

>Other countries that see immigration as an opportunity have systems that are far far superior to that of Germany.

Do you have any examples for this? Genuinely curious.

From where I stand most EU countries right now are talking steps backwards on this as they've become overloaded with migration waves, housing shortages, stagnating wages, which increased the far right support, so the hot topic now is how to discourage ALL immigration, not how to make life better and easier for SOME immigrants to attract them.

Sure, you obviously want to encourage the useful skilled immigration, but like I said, from where I stand it seems countries don't distinguish and are trying to make life hell for all immigrants just to plase the right wing voters since those would be frothing at the mouth if they heard their government is rolling out the red carped to attract SOME immigrants, so then for simplicity the political issue is binary, IMMIGRANTS or NO IMMIGRANTS.

Denmark is the same.

The official website says the wait time for permanent residency is "up to 10 months", and searching Reddit suggests 3-6 months is more normal.

Denmark is not particularly welcoming to immigrants, but they do with rules rather than inefficient paperwork.

Japan immigration (if you have a college degree) seems to be pretty high up there. PR takes a while, and processing is a bit of a black hole, but generally speaking you apply, application extends your visa a bit, and they get back to you within the period. And it’s maybe $100?

People complain but its generally predictable save for applications for a 3 year visa can lead to a 1 year visa or a 3 year visa or a 5 year visa

Australia "what countries have you been to and when" is fun, if you have traveled a bit. I thought being to Tunisia during arab spring and China and Russia might be issues! Overall it was hours of paperwork. Wife's grandmothers maiden name kinda crap in there too IIRC. Upside is Citizenship was relatively easy after this (because you have done PR already). Just had to learn some stuff about what happens in Canberra :-).

8 months is not that long; these days the wait is longer. However, you are aware of how long the wait will be, there information is right there on the Australian Immigration website: https://immi.homeaffairs.gov.au/visas/getting-a-visa/visa-pr...

Providing updates to everyone waiting simply wastes time and resources; again, you know roughly how long it's going to take as the estimated times are provided. Hassling the agent on your case is unnecessary.

Regarding leaving and returning Australia - Bridging Visa class Bs are made available if you have good reasons to be leaving and coming back.

I can see this from two sides - my (now ex) wife went through getting temporary then permanent residency in Australia; yes, it was a pain and expensive, but Australia has high standards of living etc, which is why lots of people want to come here. The other side is this - immigration is one of the reasons why there are not enough houses to buy or places to rent, making life difficult for citizens or people who have PR or TR. So if the process of having more immigrants who also require housing is expensive or difficult, I think you'll find a lot of people are not particular sympathetic.

Hmmm… that makes more sense. My experience was getting a visa automatically extended for N months on application, and applications not ever being processed slower than that. But I can totally see the US having wild backlog, for example

Is that a correct assignment? Austria-Hungary was a thing back then, but someone born and mostly living in Prague I would not call Austrian today.

(to the point most of western europe now has gov spending at 40%+ of gdp)

Perhaps that's fundamentally barking up the wrong tree. West-European governments in the post WW2 era have had higher relative spendings then that, without every financial expert and their dog declaiming that doomsday is near and services need to be cut.

We've been able to finance better healthcare before, we've able to finance better education before, we've been able to finance better infrastructure before, etc. So which costs have risen out of proportion to the point that none of that is possible today.

Any large org tends to get more inefficient with time as it accumulates inefficient components it can't get rid of

This is really the crux of it. Same incompetence and inefficiency, we see in tech industry. Are there any serious studies on the disease that comes with scale, and possibly its cure?

High government spending doesn't mean the government is bigger necessarily. The big expenses are just getting moved right back out to the private sector for agricultural subsidies, energy subsidies, etc...

The better metric would be how many employees work (directly or indirectly) for the government and then compare those numbers.

Finland has been a very poor country after WW II until the 1970s (compared to Sweden who had no war or Germany who lost the war). An economy best compared to Portugal or Greece.

The was a first overheating boom in the end of the 1980s, until a heavy recession took over in the 1990s. The next boom was Nokia driven in the 2000s until the global banking crisis. Since Nokia has fallen (well, it still exists but with a different business and more modest success) there has been little to no growth and heavy deindustrialization.

So basically Finland is back to the previous state of being a poor country with weak industry (I am exaggerating a bit). But the spending has continued to grow like the Nokia boom years had never ended.

Edit: Finland has one of the least favorite population pyramids in Europe. People getting older and no children. Very little immigration until maybe the last decade. And now a far right government with a strong anti-immigration agenda.

The central government took full responsibility of funding healthcare, social services, and some other government functions in 2023. Before that, large part of the funding came from municipal governments.

Then there is the war in Ukraine. Normally, Russia is one of the most important trading partners of Finland. But when it doesn't know how to behave, a large part of foreign trade is missing, and the economy suffers.

A combination of Covid, and the security situation with Ukraine and Russia perhaps.

How much change is that in real value?

As Weber observed, the free market requires a lot of bureaucracy.

One person's Schwachsinn is another's Vernunft.

I've never actually looked at the German budget (quasi B1 deutschkenntnisse and no training in economics, what would I get from reading them?), what I can say is that it's very easy to fall into the trap described by Chesterton's fence and call for the removal of things because you don't understand them, not because they're actually bad.

For example, someone I used to know in the UK said much the same about his taxes paying for schools, just because he personally didn't have kids.

Whereas if funding is increased, that same nepotist core will suddenly discover their spirit of public service and ensure the money is spent on better delivery, instead of further enriching themselves?

Honestly, the whole funding debate for public services is often so facile and ideologically entrenched. Both sides are right: Public services _are_ invariably inefficient, and cutting funding _does_ invariably do little to increase efficiency. But neither side will accept the validity of the other's argument and so we end up with this cycle of alternating governments imposing austerity and generosity.

"Austerity is dropout"

Excellent description, and further additions for the cynicism.

(opinion) Human society large rewards narcissism. Diligence is usually rewarded with exploitation. There's actually academic supporting the 2nd. Therefore, most politicians are largely selfish and mostly interested in being on TV, being the center of attention, and holding sway over other citizens. (Not all, just the majority). The only metric is "what gets elected." However, like "green" anything, the optimization is usually "do nothing, and color the corporate logo green."

Causes further issues. The optimization becomes, "focus on highly incendiary minutia, while avoiding anything risky, and maximizing viewer attention and anxiety." Issues that will allow them to say they're valiant, while exposing nothing especially damaging for the next election.

The American fiscal funding fiasco this / last year is typical. 6 months, and America finally has a budget. All the while, it's mostly arguments about minutia like "Homeland Security impeachment", who the speaker is, where Military can get abortions, whether a base will get funding, migrants on buses, and weekly CR shutdown "thwarting". It literally became weekly federal budgets around Feb-Mar in America... Meanwhile, a lot of enlisted in those abortion / base (yes/no?) states are wondering whether they're going to get paychecks. People on boats complain about having no ammunition to shoot with...

London's sewers are another excellent example. Dithering and dithering about repairs, about maintenance, about public toilets. Except the Thames is bright yellow, people won't go swimming, and when somebody asks, they're response is "well, btw, we're actually £18,000,000,000 in debt. Make -£2,000,000,000 per year. Have for years. Nobody even noticed. lolz." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Water Obvious optimization, nationalize while decrying the evils of the private sector. Quietly also nationalize the debt to the public in a line item somewhere that nobody writes about. Squander resources for years. Sell back to industry claiming the salvation of capitalism.

It is strange because as a Brit living in Finland there are a for sure a lot of things better in Finland when it comes to public services but renewing ID documents and setting up companies absolutely aren’t.

I don't know why does everyone on HN think that Estonia is Eastern Europe when it is actually Northern Europe (https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_Europe). All of the Baltic countries are Northern.

The same processes that led to Eastern Europe in 80-90s ending up as a nightmare where everything took ages to be handled happened to Finland with the same outcome. Bad algorithms basically. Maybe PL/EST still remember how bad it was back then and make sure they are running better algorithms, whereas Finland has no clue how bad it can get due to a lack of experience?

The trick is not to do it at the embassy, but to take a two-week holiday and do it in South Africa.

I was thinking about exactly this was I was writing my original post.

I'm currently also an expat living in the EU. The common sentiment from a lot of other South Africans here is to go back to SA for a 2 week holiday to get your passport. Apparently dealing with anything home-affairs related via your local embassy is a total shitshow. People have been waiting years for birth certificates for new babies and such.

It seems that the intersection between Home Affairs and International Relations (embassies) is in total shambles.

Our passport office is phenomenal. Too bad about everything else!

Yeah, I worked in a German startup for 2 years, managers were running it like we were manufacutring cars.

Lots of decision's, made no sense in software development.

I thought those delays were meant to encourage you to declare everything in advance on your tax card.

Like all automation, having a database of your population greatly increases your efficiency, without regard to whether this power is used to do good or to do evil.

There are many still alive who remember the evils done by the Stasi, when I was a child, there were many who remembered the evils done by the Gestapo; when those are your core examples of a citizen database, such thing naturally seems "big brother".

The irony is the mirror image: America seems almost* totally willing to have private databases while disliking government ones, Europe seems almost* totally willing to have government databases while disliking private ones.

* to anyone about to reply "not I": don't be blind to the "almost", I know many here will be exceptions

You're misinformed. Second highest tax burden [1], in Europe and the OECD [2].

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/global/tax-burden-on-labo... [2] https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/eu/tax-burden-labor-europ...

And don't forget Germany has one of the lowest annual working hours in the world

Of course if you are a civil servant or part of some mega union, but for the rest of the private plebs it is often 9h daily(because lunch break is not part of contract) and most do a long commute(because of eternal housing crisis) which may raise it to 12-14h easily.

Mmmhh... I don't think the OECD data is not working comparing countries:

"The data are published with the following health warning: The data are intended for comparisons of trends over time; they are unsuitable for comparisons of the level of average annual hours of work for a given year, because of differences in their sources and method of calculation."

Yes, in Germany are many part-time workers but overall mostly they are not working 6 hours the day . Normal is - afaik - 8 hours per day on approx. 220 days in a year.

Truly the worst thing about living in Germany is the apparent national hobby of complaining about things that perhaps aren't great, but really aren't as bad as you might think.

In practice, German schools are pretty decent, but they obsess about PISA scores and so neglect to ever notice what the schools are doing well. The train networks are fairly extensive, can be quite cheap depending on how you travel, and consistent across the country, but a lot of Germans would much rather complain about how late they are than recognise anything positive about the system. The general public transport networks (i.e. transport inside towns and cities) are amazing, and one of the things that I would most miss if I went anywhere else.

I think part of it is just that if you're German, you rarely see these systems from an outside perspective, so you only see the points that chafe regularly. But another part of it really is just that German tendency to criticise first rather than to view things holistically.

In certain parts of Germany the German equivalent of "You really can't complain" is the highest form of praise.

To then start complaining about the costs of living..?

Can you elaborate on societal coherence in Russia? This in particular piques my interest; what I hear from Russia is that it's a place where any interpersonal conflict is resolved with (verbal) violence.

Societal coherence in e.g. Russia or Norway

Russia (with the exception of its ethnic minorities) is one of the most atomized societies in Europe, actually. The Russian dream is a house in the exurbs with a three-meter-tall impenetrable fence around the lot where you can do anything you want inside and no one will bother you.

Following and make the most pedantic rules. Germans loooooove setting rules and expect everyone to follow or else they rat you or or sue you even. (see neighbour conflicts about hedges growing too far etc)

Almost one million volunteer firefighters (Freiwillige Feuerwehr). These are 96.95 % of all firefighters. (For comparison: the UK quota is 2.31%.)[1] Very popular to participate especially in many rural parts of Germany.

[1] Source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freiwillige_Feuerwehr#Deutschl... (in German)

I can't wait for the new Nigerian immigrant to swing his beer at Octoberfest arm in arm with the second generation Turk from Munich, all while the waitress, a temporary worker from the Czech Republic, rushes on.

Wait, isn't that what's happening already? I'm pretty sure the temporary worker from the Czech Republic is there, as is the second generation Turk voting for Erdogan. Not fully sure about the Nigerian immigrant though.

I just had some friends visit on the way to their home country, after spending 4 months traveling through Spain.

They liked Spain a lot, but the first comment they made when we went for a walk was how clean the streets and the surroundings where.

Your cleanliness mileage may vary per Land, I guess.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not - but in case you're not - seeing "10 cigarette butts" - instead of, say, piles of trash, dung, old broken down cars, and/or drug paraphernalia - seems pretty clean to me, as cities come.

Then travel to Switzerland and IMHO German bread is just average anymore.

One of my pet peeves is how Germans have amazing bread, but then put the blandest possible stuff (like very tasteless Cheese, and one leaf of salad) on top of it, while Italians have great stuff to put on bread but the bread itself is so boring.

Yes. Live translation services are provided for the minority of formal stuff that’s done in German. Drinking beer in the alternative track, everybody understands each other after a couple of drinks even if they didn’t before.

My biggest gripes, summed up:

- The requirements are arbitrary, undocumented, and largely depend on how the case worker feels on a given day. Common wisdom is to bring far more documents than asked for, just in case.

- Everything is paper-based. You are expected to act as a transport layer between offices that won't talk to each other. Everything is mailed, because digital communications are distrusted and digitalisation lagging far behind.

- Everything takes far longer than it should, partly due to the above, and due to chronic understaffing of government offices.

This is a problem in all major cities, and many of the smaller ones. In this case, n is a pretty big number backed by the many relocation consultants I work with. You got lucky, and I envy you.

I can confirm that moving out into the bacon belt of Brandenburg drastically improved the quality of my public services interactions (as an immigrant). Getting an anmeldung done didn't require a 3 hour ordeal and the local Ausländerbehörde answers their emails.

My favorite Berlin anecdote is when my wife (then girlfriend) and I first arrived in Germany, she was unemployed for the better part of a year as no-one would give her a chance. She actually got quite depressed about it, and reached out about state sponsored integration courses as the language lessons she was taking were expensive and she wanted to do something more holistic. The authorities told her in no uncertain terms that they didn't care and that there were no places available.

My biggest bugbear with Germany is that the state intrudes extensively in your affairs, most of the time they are being benevolent but that intrusion brings in a tremendous amount a bureaucratic baggage. And that baggage is slow, paper based, and becomes a significant barrier for doing anything. In many countries the kind of paperwork you have to slave over here just doesn't exist in the first place.

FWIW my wife and I got married in Denmark. It was impossible for my wife to provide an up-to-date (less than six months old) translated copy of her Chinese birth certificate. Theoretically she could have traveled back to china (in the middle of the pandemic) and begged her backwaters local police authority to print a new copy but they weren't obliged to issue her one. Denmark was happy with her passport and some declarations from the local authorities in Germany.

Some days I really wonder why I continue to put up with the hassle, probably just sunk cost at this point and stubbornness. Wouldn't recommend Germany for anyone with a low frustration tolerance.

Africa and Asia are pretty easy, you just pay a bribe

    > Eastern Europe is harder

Asia borders on impossible

Japanese bureaucracy has a bad rap, but it isn't that bad. There's still paperwork (not much has moved online) but the public servant staff are super helpful and guide you through things and are helpful when there is some blocker. Especially in the past 3-5 years there have big improvements with a lot of paperwork and stuff that required your personal seal has been removed, and the MyNumber card makes doing anything online very easy. I've never ever had to fax anything as people joke about (and a friend in Germany actually had to do)

Maybe your information is not up to date. 10-15 years ago you were probably right.

Since then Germany is trending down and Eastern Europe is trending up - and bureaucracy along with it. Digitization, customer friendliness, you name.

Even some random office in Serbia seems more pleasant than dealing with Germany.

Germany is trending towards becoming a has-been, like the UK (with the difference that in the current geopolitical context it's even proving to be an obstacle).

You know, I would try and defend (South) Africa at least, but I really can't. I won't call it impossible though, again at least for ZA.

In my experience, ZA bureaucracy is simpler than e.g. Germany or Greece, but general operational incompetence and corruption makes it just as slow. It's a tradeoff of more easily understanding what you have to do, but you'll have to sit in a queue for 6 hours and hope they don't tell you "the system is offline".

The closest thing to legal bribery is to go through specialist firms that deal with the bureaucracy for you, for a fee. This is also much faster as they know who's who within each department to get things done faster.

I've had friends request old documents only to learn 8 months later that the archival facility burnt down a few years ago so they don't know what documents they do or don't have. Ask a firm to do it, pay a couple thousand Rand, and they'll get it done within 3 weeks.

Wow. I’ve never had to show ID at Dutch hospitals or clinics. My GP does the referral (!!! great GP!!!) or I turn up at A&E and the (medical) intake has begun. I speak Dutch though, maybe that makes a difference?

Edit:spelling and clarification on intake

Yeah, I know what you mean. Also, even though my partner has a Dutch tax ID, we still can't file together ourselves, on account of her not having a Dutch ID, and therefore not being able to setup DigiD 'correctly'. We can have a tax consultant do it for us however!

Highly optimized for the happy path, which of course does cover 99% of cases, but you better not be in the 1% :) That's what I liked about France: nobody expects you to be normal, so everybody is used to working around systems. For the Dutch (and Germans), systems are sacred, and if they don't work, it must be you!

At the very least I'm happy I can still see my pension was registered correctly and downloads the attestations to that effect. All without visiting an office in Paris only open on Thursdays 10:00-10:30am ;)

German government just reflects the German society, which is happy to come up with an incredibly bureaucratic non-digital process on any random occasion. I was once told by a lawyer assistant in an email, that I need to call them to make an appointment for another call to discuss a billing issue. Needless to say, the matter could be clarified in a few emails, and those are the people who charge 150-200€ per hour. This is the essence of how the things are often done here by businesses which are supposedly rooting for efficiency and profit margins.

I didn't confuse anything I meant exactly what I said. To whit:

1. German companies are equally as bureaucratic because the people and society in general are culturally so into it.

2. German government is formed by German people voted by other German people, they aren't ruled by some aliens that came from of the sky, therefore are representative for them.

Pretty much. I feel like the whole fear drive German conformism comes from the Prussian times where strict hierarchies were enforced and respected, where your superior is always right so don't question it, and the same top-down leadership culture can be seen today in big traditional German corporations.

Considering these bureacratic organizations are made up of people, most of them German, could you actually conclude that? :-)

That is the most accurate term, I agree

Exactly what I was referring to in my previous post:

_I am tired of the pretentious western europe politics/administration point of view that immediately ranks everything (including good ideas) coming from Asia/global South as "not transposable to Europe" or just "not as good as our ways"._

Did you live in China as an immigrant, did you settle down there for several years, did you have to go through their immigration process ?

Yeh two weeks would be very quick for a German marriage involving foreigners, more realistically a few months at-least all things considered.

So this is pure anecdata here, but as a foreigner who married a German, it took a while, but it was relatively little work.

The biggest issue was that we needed one of my documents (the birth certificate) to have a seal of authenticity from my home country, which then all needed to be translated officially. That took longer than it needed to because we didn't realise it needed to be authenticated and so we got it returned at one point and needed to resubmit it. But apart from that, it was mostly a case of waiting for the formalities to go through - that took a couple of months in total, but it required relatively little work overall. I suspect in total, getting married in another country would have taken more work to organise and arrange, although it would probably have been quicker with the right combination of country and pre-existing documents.

Me and two of my siblings have had marriages to facilitate work visas, permanent residence and access to health care during a pregnancy. (Also because we liked the other person, but like, we would have kept liking them regardless of whether we got married.)

Most pregnancies take a while, two weeks is plenty of time. Don't even get me started on how long immigration bureaucracy takes -- two weeks is a drop in the bucket.

People often forget marriage is also a legal contract (in Germany it simplifies so many things, eg. health insurance, joint income tax filings, etc).

I think most immigrants who get married in Germany are doing it for legal reasons primarily.

Germany has laws and traditions around marriage.

If one doesn't respect German laws, best to go to a country which works differently and stay there.

The bureaucracy problem is compounded by not wanting to link databases between government organizations and a general resistance to anything digital that involves personal data (except Facebook et al. for some reason), which reduces efficiency a lot.

However, this is understandable given German history.

The immigration office in Lübeck, STB inner city, is overworked like everywhere, but they are competent, friendly, and decently digitalized. From what a US friend of mine who lived in many cities in Germany told me, it’s pretty much an exception, though.

Amazing, thanks!

A very good summary. There's also more Nazis in America than in Germany, and more far-right hatred in general.

I had my first LLC in grade school over a summer. I didn’t make a ton of money, but I did earn enough for my first real computer, which launched my interest in programming.

When my wife started her current business as a consultant, she was living off her savings from teaching high school. If you think every entrepreneur has €25k of capital, you need to reevaluate what your country thinks of entrepreneurship.

I disagree. 25k euro is simultaneously a large and not a large amount of money. It's big enough to lock out many potential small business founders. But also many ordinary inexperienced people can have that amount of money up front, yet still be deterred by the complexity of a 6 week long incorporation process as described in this article. Especially in the early days of a company when your stress level is already through the roof dealing with the actual problems of your new business.

I am generally suspicious of rhetoric like "you're a little well off, so we can heap arbitrary amounts of bullshit on you and you shouldn't complain".

Most self-employed people in Germany operate as "Kleinunternehmer" and therefore lack the liability protections provided by the LLC equivalent discussed in the article. It's apples to oranges.

That depends how they defined self-employed. It could vary widely based on which vehicle was used, LLC, LTD, sole-proprietor. And LLC and LTD is ambiguous, yet easy to attain outside Germany.

These kind of frictions are typically not an exception. When I read this blog post about the steps to just start a business, I immediately assume that there'll be similar frictions during other steps. And indeed, the comments here talk about the difficulty to own a home when the money was already paid in October, how it can take up to 2 years to close down a company, or how there's a 30% exit tax even if you leave the country only for a few years.

The friction that you seem to like has almost certainly cost Germany a good deal of jobs from people who decides that the hassle just wasn't worth it.

It is and it isn't. The IHK registration is a sham, since they're a government protected cartel that don't even act in the interests of those they're supposed to guard (like Azubis).

Security through friction is not an ideal security model at all.

Even better heh.

Delaware’s corporate law is more developed so investors have more certainty of what they are getting

Delaware courts are also efficient, which makes litigation less likely to turn into a multi-year and multi-million dollar affair.

a customer (UK Ltd) who declared bankruptcy owing us a money and then then next day founded a new Ltd company and tried to act like he didn't owe us the money because it was a new entity.

That is... how bankruptcy works? He literally didn't owe you money anymore. Obviously you shouldn't extend his new company credit, but extinguishing old debts is the exact purpose of bankruptcy.

I have not come across this kind of thing in Germany.

Oh, it does exist :)

How does the involvement of a notary at the time of formation reduce the risk of the company going bankrupt?

Is the notary able to model creditworthiness (i.e. they’re acting as a rating agency), or do they just sniff out “undesirables” by some ad hoc, unregulated process involving their personal judgement, or is it something else entirely?

Example - a customer (UK Ltd) who declared bankruptcy owing us a money and then then next day founded a new Ltd company and tried to act like he didn't owe us the money because it was a new entity.

Depends. This can be illegal and he is personally liable for the amount. That being said, he might have done things by the book and his previous venture is bankrupted.

Indeed, my mistake and agree. Here, I wanted to refer to the fact that the transfer of ownership could likely be done even without involving a notary or a human in a properly digitalized system.

:) Yeah, nothing illegal ever happens.

Was this in Sweden? In that case, I have heard of cases where a condo that someone bought had an unknown bank loan taken out against it.

The bank loan is still attached to the condo even if it changes owners. The bank can force you to sell the condo to pay the loan back to the bank.

You can then turn around and sue the previous owner who took out the loan. Good luck with that.

I don't think this happens very often and usually the condo association knows which loans are taken out against which condos.

Also it seems that 30% loss was mostly in regions not experiencing economic growth. While others actually saw growth in the number of notaries as well.

Yes, for Germany you can expect at least around 5k/a in costs for accounting, audits etc.

I was a but optimistic on my wording, But in the US they are not government employees(they are not paid any sort of salary) just citizens who are authorized to verify signatures(a governmental duty, which is why I called them minor government officials) and are are allowed to collect a small fixed fee for their effort.

Are there other officially hereditary jobs still out there?

Germany and "digital" payments have a history due to old reasons.

We don't appreciate its meaning anymore, but cash is literally the only anonymous payment method you can have in this lifetime, and people in Germany tend NOT to trust any entity/company/government holding your data for no particular purpose.

The downside of this is the split brain problem that you have with distributed systems: a state knows something about you that another state maybe doesn't, which leads to "interesting" things like illegal people having multiple identities in several states, etc. Weird s**.

This one [0]? Legend, flipping through the records there was a dream come true for some years. But Vinyl shops world-wide had to close, but only this.

[0] https://www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de/inhalt.stuttgart-album-zu...

“Accepting cards” is not the same as “accepting credit cards” though… A lot of them only accept girocards and not credit cards…

Admittedly, this was almost a year ago. I found I could pay with credit cards in Berlin, but once I was in smaller areas I was looked at like I was insane if I tried to pay by anything other than cash. Probably didn’t help that my German was terrible.

In particular, I was staying in Nordhausen for work for a couple weeks. The hotel I stayed at tried to refuse to accept that I paid by card online in advance. Every small restaurant I went to refused to accept either a credit or debit card, and only a couple chain (read:overpriced) restaurants would accept Mastercard. When I tried to buy an Ethernet cable at a general store they refused to accept anything other than cash once they realized I was a foreigner.

Maybe it’s a myth in large population centres, but definitely not overall. I had roughly the same experience throughout most of Thuringia, with even gas stations in certain areas only accepting cash.

No, you don’t necessarily. Estonia has an e-Residency program targeted exactly at this scenario: Having a company in Estonia but living abroad. However, Germany being Germany, you will still have to deal with the Finanzamt and all the nice stuff that comes with it. So while you can run an Estonian company from Germany and be employed by it, I doubt you will gain much freedom from it. There’s really no escaping German bureaucracy without leaving the country.

This thread is discussing limited-liability companies. You're personally liable for that Kleinunternehmer, in Germany your only option is a GmbH.

If you think that's unfair, oh boy, wait until you hear about our infamous trade schools and apprenticeships.

Got any stories to tell? ;)

Don't know how it works in the UK/Germany, but an LLC isn't a complete shield against liability. If you're scamming people or acting recklessly you could easily find your personal assets targeted by a judge.

That sounds unlike anything I've ever read about it? Where have you seen this?

Here is the law that regulates GmbHs, with the paragraph specific to UGs:

https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/gmbhg/__5a.html

Where in the GmbH-law do you find anything to support your claim?

This is wrong. The UG offers the same protection as the GmbH. It's probably less trusted.

Funfact: you should always use the full title, Companyname UG (haftungsbeschränkt) on all communications and contracts. Emitting the 'haftungsbeschränkt' or shortening it 'haftungsb.' may make you as a CEO personally liable for damages occured.

I really get tired of the old world bullshit, especially regarding share capital. It seems it was more useful as a form of Proof of Stake to support old isolated currencies that doesn't have much relevancy in a monetary union.

But I'm glad Luxembourgh, Estonia and others do things that mirror new world novelties, while remaining easier to bank in the EU with than non-EU entities, and look familiar to EU residents.

German culture is about work, and working for _someone_, not starting your own business.

I wonder how Germany will survive the 21st century, where a key part is to make/capture a market first by some innovation that comes out of some startup scene (Silicon Valley most prominently) and push out all the other players.

German's in tech spheres keep complaining that they are being "ripped of" by the Anglo-Saxon space, but it seems to me it's actually their own mentality that is holding them back.

And of course everyone knows the story about the mp3 format, apparently invented in Germany and monetized in the US

Ah that’s quite a neat coincidence!

Yes, that's correct. Other people did the real, heavy lifting to get things done, but my idea caught their attention.

Ah yes, you're right. I'm still not that settled in on the rules... :-D

No, I had to do this when I moved to Europe with my non-married fiancee.

Some states can give you a statement saying "This person never has gotten married in our state", but they cannot pull the records of every state. In fact, the state that I was living in could not even do that -- only individual counties could pull records saying "This person did not have a wedding within this county". There are no central records.

When I tried to use that as a record of non-marriage, it was not accepted for the above reasons. My fiancee and I needed to give a signed oath to a notary that we were not married, and take that document to the state's office to be apostilled.

I can't speak to whether that would qualify in Germany, but it seems like it'd be pretty easy to establish residency in some state for the explicit purposes of getting one of these if you were committed to this for some sort of scam or something.

I am seeing different things online about this, de.usembassy.gov says "no such government issued document exists in the United States", but maybe they are referring to the federal government.

In any case it say that since 2021 Germany will accept a sworn oath from US residents to declare their eligibility.

I don't know how common it is, but this is a page of the Stuttgart court:

https://oberlandesgericht-stuttgart.justiz-bw.de/pb/,Lde/Sta...

- Countries without a link they have no info

- Countries with a link, but are cursive, generally provide the certificate in most cases (this seems to be broken, I see no cursive ones, but the UK is among this group, which one can see when opening the link; but that seems to be the minority).

- All others they seem to suggest need to go through the exemption process.

because the bureaucracy also cares that the contract is valid.

There are probably all kinds of tricks you could pull by being married for a bit, then declaring the marriage false all along, but not going through the official divorce process.

it's not like people don't know it is a very bad idea to sign documents where they do not even understand a single word

The laws are there for people who may feel like they don’t have much choice in the matter. And yes lying to officials that you did in fact have a choice and are totally doing this of your own free will and yes of course you understand the document you’re signing is a big part of it.

This is similar to how some pregnancy related health clinics have things like “Sign the sample cup with blue pen if all good, use the red pen if you’re being forced to be here”

Hah! Americans have to file US tax whether they live in the US or not.

I updated my comment to improve its clarity. I can see how it was unclear to you.

It depends where you go. I believe (but could be mistaken) that there are agreements between countries, especially within the EU, that enable them to go after you. I am also not sure what the statute of limitations is regarding tax-related crimes. But it could be a valid strategy, I guess!

Or does Germany have some other forms of companies that I don't know?

There are 9 forms of companies in Germany, only two of which (GmbH and AG [stock corporation/PLC/...]) require fixed capital and a notary.

France is much more digitalized compared to Germany, you can't really put them in the same basket.

The issue on the French side is more that they put the exact same excruciating procedures they had in paper online and didn't simplify too much in the process.

If not, my next question would be: what kind of process do you need to go through to sell a company in Germany? :)

I don't get that service. How are they able to do it much faster than yourself?