Arancha Ruiz Bachs Ph.D.

A call to all entrepreneurs, founders, small business owners in Europe and anyone else who aspires to star a company at some point. This is the moment to act and let your voice be heard on EU Inc. EU Inc is the proposed legislation to make it easier to start and grow a company across Europe. It is now in front of the European Parliament and also being negotiated by governments. The objective should be very clear: you should be able to start and grow your company in Europe as your home market. What this should mean is, I think, at a minimum this: 1, You should be able to start a company online and cheaply. 2. You should be able to have a simple registration that you can fill out by yourself, with secure identity checks built in. You should not be forced to hire and pay a notary for this process. 3. The basic rules should be the same across Europe and should be common. There should be one registry with common rules and you shouldn't have to go to the lawyers of each country to set up different subsidiaries. 4. There should be a simple way to give employees a share in what they are helping you build, through stock options. They should only pay the tax when they sell those shares and when they receive the money. 5. The paperwork should be much simplified. There should be one channel for doing the VAT across borders and use the time saved to do your job and not to do paperwork. 6. The rules should support the entire life of the business; raising money, growing, going public, and also liquidating a failed business should all be done under the European common rules. Opening a bank account in another country, hiring across borders should be seemless. The European Commission made an initial proposal that was not sufficiently ambitious in my view but that was a useful start: it had online registration in 48 hours for less than €100 and measures to facilitate the taxation of employee stock options. It had some rules on common liquidation of the companies. In my view it was not ambitious enough because it allowed national authorities to impose further requirements, such as notaries. It was already falling short on tax and employment, but the reforms that the other institutions are introducing are making it even less ambitious. The draft that is being discussed by the governments eliminates the European company register and replaces it with a website that is just a portal to underlying national systems. This does not improve the creation of companies in any way. They're also eliminating the common procedures to liquidate failed companies, which was very useful because it facilitates the financing of these companies. The danger in the legislation is that it will require so many national exceptions that the founders will, in fact, end up facing still all the different regimes and it will make absolutely no difference. What I suggest here is that you write to your member of the European Parliament this week. Tell them about the obstacles your business is facing: the paperwork, the difficulty of giving shares, of raising money across borders. Explain what it costs and why it makes it difficult to create employment. Ask them what they will do to help you to make this legislation useful. Your MEPs work for you. Here are their contact details: competecentre.eu/the-launch-… The MEP leading Parliament’s work is René Repasi. The other political-group negotiators are Axel Voss, Pascale Piera, Mario Mantovani, Pascal Canfin, Sergey Lagodinsky, Kira Marie Peter-Hansen, Arash Saeidi and Marcin Sypniewski. Share this with other entrepreneurs. Help make sure that the people writing the law hear from the people that the law is meant to help.