> Starting out a company as a UG & Co KG is a tax optimization move, not a liability issue

Thanks for the clarification. However I’m still surprised that tax optimization is also considered a footnote in these conversations.

In the countries I’m familiar with (mostly the US, minor second-hand experience with friends in some other countries as they started their businesses) starting a limited liability business venture that has the tax structure of a business isn’t considered a heroic effort. Starting the business is basically the least of your concerns. Almost a formality.

When I first started my company I half assed it. The LLC was quick and the EIN took two weeks. I accidentally signed a contract with my name instead of the company and elected to be a sole proprietorship. These are all the worst ways tax-wise to do this.

By Nov that year I decided to look into the tax implications and they were unpleasant so I wrote the IRS asking to be considered an S corp from the beginning of the year and they sent me a letter saying it was so. I ran payroll in Dec to catch up.

When doing taxes likewise I added a cover letter explaining the mistake about which entity was to receive the money and then assigned the income to the S corp on the return and worked everything through and corrected it in the right way.

The return took months to process and I had a mistake in the taxes that I was fined for a couple thousand which was reasonable but they accepted all these natural errors that I fixed up.

That sequence of encounters with the US government blew my mind. The much maligned IRS was eminently reasonable.

The GmbH has the tax structure of a business, as it is a business.

He wanted something more special than that.

Which is possible, but complicated.