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Switzerland is maybe a bit better than Germany but the differences are small. The bureaucracy around running a company is still light years worse than the USA or UK. Forming a GmbH or AG still requires the involvement of notaries, for example, still involves significant amounts of paperwork, and still requires up-front 20k CHF (afaik not delayable). The UG holding company isn't apparently useful here and there's no mandatory IHK equivalent but the rest is similar. But where things really start to hurt is the mandatory insurances and pension payments that are required the first time you hire someone i.e. yourself. Not only is it very expensive (~25% of salary), it's so complicated you can't actually do it yourself and neither can your accountant, so they all go via insurance brokers. In other words there's two different firms between me and the insurers, all of whom are adding huge delays and costs. The agreement with just one of these insurers is 25 pages of highly technical German. Oh and don't even try the barrel of laughs that is issuing employees with equity, let alone options. It's the slowness that gets me. The tax office is backlogged by years. Even a professional, decent sized Treuhand (roughly = accountant) will routinely do things like go on holiday for a month, come back, get sick for a couple of weeks, go on holiday again, etc. The mere process of setting up the company and fully completing that setup took me >1 year this time. And that's assuming you actually get competent help: I'm now on my third Treuhand because the first two made huge & obvious errors in their work (e.g. lots of typos in submitted documents, calling me Frau instead of Herr, unable to answer basic questions etc). But this is not specific to forming companies. Swiss bureaucracy is hilariously kafkaesque and slow in other ways too. Recently I got a letter that my C (work) permit would expire in a month, so here is an invite to book an appointment with the local government office to come in and get another. I go online to book, which you can at least do, and discover they have no free appointments at all for a month and a half. OK, whatever, I book the first available slot. When I turn up they immediately fine me for being "late". I explain that I've come literally as soon as they allowed me too (you need the mailed invitation to turn up), but the lady shows me the fine print where it says that I have to inform them if I can't come within a month for any reason and that this, apparently, includes reasons they already know about like "we don't have enough staff to see people". They then charged me a few hundred francs for the privilege of getting my documents renewed, booked me another appointment to get a photo taken (another few weeks of delay) and of course during this time I can't travel outside the country because my documents have expired. Problem is, everything here is like this. Every interaction with the government will take months, require the payment of hundreds of francs and involve Brazil-esque procedures that mostly involve manually schlepping printed papers between the huge and numerous government offices that dot the highly expensive real estate of the city. In many ways the internet never really happened here beyond online calendars so the offices often don't communicate with each other using wires. It literally often boils down to "print it out, stamp it, give it to you to deliver". |
Maybe the system got overloaded later? Or maybe it differs per canton?