[darkwater]

Good luck with that, Italy and Italians are one of the most bureaucracy-obsessed country on the planet. You can think you own country has bureaucracy issues? Go check Italy, and it will be for sure worse. I mean, in 2022 AFAIK and still not every salaried person can have a default pre-compiled tax draft that they can just sign on the Internet and get approved. You have to go and compile it one from scratch (I think the situation is changing but still not everybody has this by default). Also there is this idea where you get by default a lot of taxes but that you can opt-in to many helps for various topics (like, improving your house energy efficiency) which will reduce your tax burden, over usually 5 or 10 years after you paid for it cash. There are small taxes and fees for everything, you had to pay an annual tax to validate your passport (which was obviously checked only when you left Italy, if you live abroad nobody even knows about it, so now they made it a big fee at passport renewal every 10years) and so on. Source: an Italian living abroad, tired of bureaucracy .

[bonzini]

> still not every salaried person can have a default pre-compiled tax draft that they can just sign on the Internet and get approved. You have to go and compile it one from scratch

This has changed several years ago.

> you had to pay an annual tax to validate your passport

Keyword being had. It's gone for like 10 years.

[lnxg33k1]

Yeah like I am not sure, when I was living in London, not being Schengen, at a certain point I got in mind to just go to "Questura" and make my electronic passport so that I could go through the fast automatic gate, I went there, paid the "Bollo", and I explained that I had to depart in a couple of days, and I just got the e-passport the morning I had to depart.. like it was blazing fast, I mean for my experience, getting passports in Italy is really a no-brainer

[squarefoot]

Some things have been sped up a lot (thanks to the EU), however in some cases bureaucracy still slows down even the simplest document request. Personal experience: I want to relocate, so last summer I found a new home and quickly paid a 20K Euros non refundable (in case of withdraw) deposit upfront. Unfortunately I later discovered that my own home can't be sold at market value, or to be more accurate to be purchased at market value with an authorized mortgage, because it was originally intended as (can't translate the proper Italian term) roughly half-owned-by-the-state-property which was a formula intended to help poor families to buy their home for cheap in city developing areas during the 80s. I have no resources to buy the new home without selling the old one first, and no intentions of getting into debt for it.

To make it short, if I want to sell my home at market value to someone paying with a mortgage (likely 98% of buyers need one) I have to request some documentation which involves a tax, which in my case amounts to 5K Euros, plus a notary lawyer for documents filling and transmission which cost a few hundreds Euros. All fine and dandy, too bad that the mean time between the document request and when it is being released amounts to 7-8 months! Big WTF... 7-8 months for a fucking stamp on a piece of paper, plus hopefully one record in a database! I filled, paid and sent the request last January, let's see how much time will it need. I am extremely lucky that the owner of the home I'm buying will wait until next summer, and I'll have to deposit more money to drag it further, or I would have lost all my deposit only because of bureaucracy.

[lnxg33k1]

That sucks sorry, good luck.. I’m so lucky that I dont own an house and can’t afford a mortgage in any way :D

[darkwater]

I always had to do several hoops and loops through the consulate to get my 1st and then renew my passport abroad. But maybe we Italians living abroad are a snowflake and an edge case in this regard (like, I still renewed 6 months ago my ID card and it is still made of fucking paper)

[lnxg33k1]

Soon after that I got also my e-id, what a bloody win not being watched anymore like a neanderthaler every time I had to show my ID :D (but I lost the PIN) (But then I got the SPID and didn't need the e-ID anymore :D)

[darkwater]

For SPID I'm also trapped in some loop where I can't get it easily from abroad, and I still don't understand why.

[lnxg33k1]

Have you tried Aruba? I have done remotely up to the level 2 with them, and the verification compared to the one from Poste is just via webcam, you just hop on a chat with them, move your head left and right, make a jump, a turn, hold your ID close to your face and the guy just approves the identity, try if you haven't thought of them yet

[kwere]

with Sielte i did the SPID online in three days

[darkwater]

> This has changed several years ago.

AFAIK not yet for everybody

> Keyword being had. It's gone for like 10 years.

I think it's less, but in my last renewal in 2017 I had to pay over 100€ all at once which is ridiculous (but at least less ridiculous than having to put a 10€ physical "marca da bollo" each and every year).

[bonzini]

> AFAIK not yet for everybody

For all employees (lavoratori dipendenti) and retired people.

[allendoerfer]

You are basically describing Germany. I try to put it on first-mover disadvantage to make me feel better: Basically Germany has had a relatively functioning administration for hundreds of years (Italy even for thousands). Compared to something you would design from scratch in 2022 it looks a bit archaic. I celebrate every little step forward.

[yywwbbn]

The US administrative and political system is objectively older and more archaic than the ones in almost every European country (besides Britain, Switzerland and maybe(?) Scandinavian countries). Germany was established in 1949 and Italy is a fairly new country as well.

[kuschku]

> Germany was established in 1949

That’s a neat myth, but you’ll constantly interface with laws and bureaucratic structures from the pre-WWI empire (e.g. most of the school system, a lot of taxes, the entire healthcare system) and sometimes even Prussian laws from before the German Union.

[allendoerfer]

As other commentors pointed out: The fundamentals of German bureaucracy are way older than 1949.

Americans seem to have a special relation to their constitution, but in practice you interface with more detailed areas of the law much more often. The civil code of Germany [0] is from 1881 and even then was not written from scratch, but contains Prussian laws etc.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%C3%BCrgerliches_Gesetzbuch

[oblio]

Modern Germany and Italy are successor states to much older entities, and frequently stuff from those ages creeps in.

Well, every European country has this. France is at the Fifth Republic right now but I can bet that there's some obscure law hidden somewhere that's from the time of Philip II of France.

[Bayart]

The current Switzerland goes back to 1848. There was a massive shift n administration and statecraft throughout Europe after the French Revolution, even in Scandinavia. Britain's the only country that kept to its own.

[darkwater]

Italy is a new country but relies on older habits and in general on a more conservative mindset.

[lnxg33k1]

I think Italy is below Germany at a bureaucratic level, I am not fully convinced that bureaucracy is the main issue, I think the main issue is the lack of electronic and fast and reliable and documented ways to complete requirements

[frafra]

I guess you are not an Italian living in Germany then :-)

[gw67]

I am startup owner (SRL, limited liability company). I have incorporated the company in 1 day through a notary. Other activities related to taxes are outsourced by €2k-3k/year accountant. Yeah, it could be easier, but it's not the problem.

If you build a startup and your main concern are those tax activities, I assume you are not building a startup. That's definitely not the hardest part :)

[kwere]

FUN FACT: in Italy there are 160K regulations (75k at national level), 7000 in France, 5500 in Germany [0]. I would say that the structure is to shift responsabilities down the power stream. For example, Doctor were legally and financially liable if any covid patient got aftereffects [1]

[0] https://www.corriere.it/economia/aziende/cards/imprese-itali...

[1]https://www.univrmagazine.it/2020/04/09/emergenza-covid-19-e...

[riffraff]

> Go check Italy, and it will be for sure worse.

I live in Hungary, am Italian, Hungary is worse for most things.

[C19is20]

Sounds like you've been living abroad for about 15 years.

[mcs_]

it seems like they are building it in the Netherlands