Opening an account for NPOC, NCUC and NCSG in Estonia

[Raoul Plommer]

Ayden, I guess you didn't bother to read the last paragraph of my email,
before quickly typing up your personal disdain.

I now have the ambition of creating a registered organisation to "support"
> NPOC in Estonia and open a bank account for it. It will also need its own
> charter but I already know how to go about it. Once we have all this set up
> and working, perhaps NCUC and NCSG can then be better persuaded to follow
> the same route.
>

I'd also be curious to hear, what exactly are the benefits of keeping our
current haphazard model? I can't really see any, apart from that we are
used to them.

-Raoul

On Sun, 13 Jan 2019 at 13:32, Ayden Férdeline <icann at ferdeline.com> wrote:

> I am disappointed that the concerns that Moritz has raised have been
> glossed aside so quickly, as his concerns are well-founded. I think this
> proposal - that the NCSG open a bank account in Estonia - is
> under-developed and I don't see how the NCSG Executive Committee could be
> in a position to properly assess the risks in the absence of independent
> legal advice. As Stephanie alluded to in an earlier email, there are
> benefits to our current structure, and if there is to be a change to it, I
> think it should be on the basis of a solid proposal and informed legal
> opinion, and not written on the back of a napkin.
>
> Ayden
>
>
> ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
> On Sunday, January 13, 2019 11:19 AM, Raoul Plommer <plommer at GMAIL.COM>
> wrote:
>
> Yes, I am well aware of the maintenance, that a nonprofit organisation
> needs, for I created one a little over a year ago and am the chair of it.
> I'm quite sure Estonia is less strict on things than Finland and
> maintaining the necessary skeleton of a nonprofit org is actually not that
> hard.
>
> In any case, the fiscal responsibility is the hardest part, but even that
> means that we just need to store receipts of our transactions and submit
> them at the end of the year. We are doing this anyway. I would also say,
> that all three organisations have less than ten transactions per year.
>
> I now have the ambition of creating a registered organisation to "support"
> NPOC in Estonia and open a bank account for it. It will also need its own
> charter but I already know how to go about it. Once we have all this set up
> and working, perhaps NCUC and NCSG can then be better persuaded to follow
> the same route.
>
> -Raoul
>
> On Sun, 13 Jan 2019 at 00:16, Moritz Bartl <bartl at renewablefreedom.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On 08.01.19 09:30, James Gannon wrote:
>> > This is a lot more complicated a topic than I think people are giving
>> > credit to.
>> > No-one has yet spoken about legal liabilities that come from
>> > establishing a legal entity, and I also don’t believe that anyone has
>> > spoken to ICANN legal yet (Currently we only exist as an entity within
>> > the ICANN bylaws, also there are interactions with the Empowered
>> > Community responsibilities that would need to be incorporated into the
>> > establishment of any entity).
>> >
>> > Please don’t take this as a negative thing, but I think people are
>> > underestimating the work and complexity involved here.
>>
>> This. A hundred times this.
>>
>> What is being discussed here is _not_ merely "opening a bank account".
>> What you are discussing is to set up organizations.
>>
>> At our foundation, a lot of what we do is help grassroots/early stage
>> projects bootstrap, to help them set up their own non-profits (and
>> sometimes for-profits), and to deal with the complexities arising from it.
>>
>> My usual recommendation is to think hard about it, and to better partner
>> with an existing organization that has good procedures to cover your own
>> governance model. This is called "fiscal sponsorship", a concept well
>> established in the US (with a lot of providers) but not so much in
>> Europe. We also started our own fiscal sponsor for free software
>> projects in 2016, now handling 15+ projects with distributed teams and
>> loose membership, with an annual budget of more than 500k.
>>
>> We have investigated "the Estonian model". Don't be fooled by the ease
>> of setting up: You also need to maintain it. There is little information
>> available about Estonians non-profit tax regime and laws regarding
>> international activities. I know from our own work that in many European
>> countries, acting internationally is _not_ straightforward, and you
>> cannot simply pay whatever invoices and travel without carefully
>> crafting bylaws, defining governance structures, and having a story
>> around every singe receipt. Someone needs to make sure this information
>> is there. It is NOT simply a meeting every once in a while, it requires
>> constant caretaking or it will cause a lot of headaches for the poor
>> soul that needs to clean up.
>>
>> Fiscal sponsors have established processes, support somewhat
>> fuzzy/in-process governance models, and of course don't require a change
>> of legal bank account owner.
>>
>> If you run an account under your name, or a shared account with someone
>> else, you have the full legal responsibility. But, maybe more
>> importantly, what you receive to this account is (shared) income. If you
>> don't declare it with your taxes, you are committing tax fraud. If you
>> buy services, you buy them for you, and they become your legal
>> responsibility. You can do so as a group, no problem, but you are not
>> magically "not a legal entity".
>>
>> You will not be able to create "an international organization". An
>> organization always needs a location and thus a tax regime it will
>> operate under. There are some "modern forms" like the European SE, but
>> they are mostly European in name/appearance and not by jurisdiction:
>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Societas_Europaea
>>
>> --
>> Moritz Bartl, Germany
>>
>> Renewable Freedom Foundation
>> https://www.renewablefreedom.org/
>> Center for the Cultivation of Technology
>> https://www.techcultivation.org/
>>
>
>
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