Opening an account for NPOC, NCUC and NCSG in Estonia

Wed Jan 16 08:58:23 EET 2019

I am sorry folks, but I think we have exhausted this discussion.  Please take it to the Finance Committee list, we are losing members on the Discuss list.  I am also happy to establish a skype or slack channel for those members who are interested, if you insist on continuing the debate, or we can move it to the policy committee list.

Thanks!

Stephanie Perrin

NCSG Chair

On 2019-01-16 04:42, Remmy Nweke wrote:
Hi Stephanie
Thanks to Ramirez for the intervention.

I am not sure both you and Sam have this kind of account except I am missing something.

I thought he opened account for NPOC.

At the same time there will be a cost of operating whatever account we eventually decided and must not overlook budgeting or planning for this cost alongside every plan.
Regards
Remmy

On Tue, 15 Jan 2019, 11:30 p.m. Stephanie Perrin <stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca<mailto:stephanie.perrin at mail.utoronto.ca> wrote:

Tamir has volunteered to get some legal advice on this from those who understand banking better.  The account is free.  I think Sam's account is on the same basis as mine.  I am looking into business numbers.  I think we have it all in hand.  Sam and Joan and I are actually quite far from each other.  As long as it costs nothing, I think we should stick to this plan, while we investigate all the ramifications of this.

Cheers Stephanie

On 2019-01-15 16:32, Remmy Nweke wrote:
Hi Stephanie
Hope this meets you well.
Will not be of best interest to leverage the NPOC account which Sam once opened and since you are also within reach to make this the best we can.

I had previously suggested we leverage this kind of account before Sam insight came with hope that there should be some kind of Memorandum of Understanding among the Cs and NCSG in the case of any hiccup with hope that will help us navigate the NCSG imbroglio with a given percentage set aside to caution the taxes that is associated with it in the event we have inflows, so that we do not overlabour our volunteers for choosing to serve at the highlevels.

May be a revisit will help us all.
Remmy
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On Tue, Jan 15, 2019 at 7:33 PM Stephanie Perrin <stephanie at digitaldiscretion.ca<mailto:stephanie at digitaldiscretion.ca>> wrote:

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<mailto: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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