Opening an account for NPOC, NCUC and NCSG in Estonia

[Stephanie Perrin]

Thanks for this discussion, Tapani and Moritz.  Obviously, I am 
concerned abou this because I have no desire to pay income tax on the 
amount potentially coming into my account from the PIR account, 
particularly because it is coming form the United States and this would 
not, to the best of my knowledge, be covered under the waiver we all 
sign as volunteers accepting travel funds from ICANN.  I will be asking 
my account for advice on this, at my own expense.  The long arm of the 
IRS is not to be underestimated, for us Canadians, and they can be quite 
arbitrary about alleging taxes owed.

Stephanie

On 2019-01-13 06:25, Tapani Tarvainen wrote:
> On Jan 12 23:15, Moritz Bartl (bartl at RENEWABLEFREEDOM.ORG) wrote:
>
>> What is being discussed here is _not_ merely "opening a bank account".
>> What you are discussing is to set up organizations.
> Yes. That is the whole point, specifically to avoid this:
>
>> If you run an account under your name, or a shared account with
>> someone else, you have the full legal responsibility.
> Yes. And that is our situation now.
>
>> 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.
> This is not correct in general. Rules vary from country to country, of
> course, and what you say may be true in some, but certainly not all -
> the following applies in at least some I happen to know of.
>
> All money that comes to your accounts is not income nor should be
> declared as such. You can, for example, borrow or lend money, and if
> there's no interest involved there's no income either nor any need to
> declare such debts with your taxes (at least if your country has no
> property tax).
>
> More to the point, you can use your own account to handle money
> belonging to someone else, including an association, without any tax
> implications, and in many countries law also recognizes unregistered
> or unincorporated associations (with various limitations on what they
> can or can't do).
>
> Whether any incoming money is ultimately taxable or needs to be
> declared depends on all kinds of things, but often, e.g., membership
> fees are tax exempt.
>
>> If you buy services, you buy them for you, and they become your
>> legal responsibility.
> That is not quite accurate either. You can buy services even for an
> unregistered association. You will be responsible for them, but if you
> try to, say, take them away from the association, its other members
> can sue you and win, depending on details of course.
>
>> You can do so as a group, no problem, but you are not magically "not
>> a legal entity".
> I'm not quite sure what that means, but certainly even an unregistered
> association can be a legal entity.
>
> Registering or incorporating an association changes the situation, in
> particular it limits personal responsibility and makes a number of
> things legally much easier and better defined, but it's not a totally
> clear cut, black-and-white distinction.
>
> Anyway, you are absolutely right that there are all kinds of legal
> complications and they should be well researched before incorporating
> NCSG in any country.
>
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