i could not find the most important question while skim reading: does it have to be germany. i would rather sit in boiling water than found a company there again. you don't always have to move away completely to have a non germany company though i can also recommend that final step.
Bingo. I live in Berlin. I know loads of folks who found Delaware corporations, use deel.com to work for them, and eventually found a GmbH when they need to.
Tangential question for third-country nationals in Berlin (like me right now): Does the Berlin immigration office readily give EU Blue Cards to people in that arrangement, or do they say it's really a form of self-employment because you own the company you're working for? And do the public health insurance funds treat this as employment or self-employment for purposes of qualifying for public health insurance, for people who don't yet have that?
Of course, the immigration question wouldn't matter for other immigration situations like holding German or EU citizenship, German permanent residence or EU long-term permanent residence, family reunification permits, or anyone who actually gets explicit approval to be self-employed. And the health insurance question wouldn't matter for people switching from employment (with public health insurance) to self-employment.
The freelance visa requires a local economic interest (a reason to live here), usually in the form of German customers. There is nothing mentioned about where the company is registered and it should not matter.
Practically though, the immigration office's bureaucrats are by definition as far removed from entrepreneurship as they can be, and might struggle to reconcile the documents you have with the list of documents they are told to ask for.
Understood, yeah. (And thanks for your site, I've consulted it several times!) The rules I was asking about were the EU Blue Card rules and the rules for getting into public health insurance (GKV) without previously having such coverage within the EU.
My impression is that working for a company one substantially owns or controls, regardless of where it is registered, can lead to them deciding that it's self-employment and disqualifying a third-country national from using that work as the basis for an EU Blue Card or GKV.
Also, the rules for obtaining an EU Blue Card (or a skilled worker permit) require the employer to have a place of business in Germany, and that might be hard to demonstrate when the only tie to Germany is the location of the applicant. No idea if just renting a German office address for the business would suffice. At least Americans, Canadians, and other §41 AufenthV Abs 1 nationalities can bypass this obstacle with the §26 BeschV permit instead, with some extra approval and priority check paperwork. But this doesn't help with the issues in the previous paragraph of potentially being viewed as self-employment for immigration and insurance purposes.
Germany has CFC & management and control rules. Those LLCs are treated as german companies in the eyes of the Finanszamt if their UBO (Ultimate Beneficiary Owner) has a german tax residency and is managing the company from germany.
Sorry to be the one to break it to you but essentially they're all committing tax fraud.
What's the benefit of doing that? You'd still be subject to the local laws if you are in Germany for more than > 6 months a year and the fees that Deel is charging for your salary are not that low either.
With high privacy jurisdictions such as Delaware, New Mexico, Wyoming, etc. they're essentially keeping the german tax authority in the dark about the ownership of those LLCs, which might change now with the new US mandated filing with FinCEN for UBOs.
They're all committing tax fraud and thinking they're in the clear, only getting away with it due to lack of international cooperation. It will bite them in the ass sooner or later, the taxman always gets his cut. The only way to avoid it is to physically move out.
That's what I suspected. The amount of misinformation regarding tax-residency and exit taxes that people just believe because they saw some YouTube videos is scary.
It might be tough, but even 25 years ago, my worst case (in Norway) to get a US bank account was to find one that'd let me have the paperwork notarized at the US consulate. The next step up in difficulty was flying to the US and open it in person. It still limits your choice, but last time I was involved in it it was easier (we found a bank that had a branch in the country my then cofounder was in)
