Death and Taxes...

[Bulba]

I'm sorry for casting aspersions or for any negative implications. But I saw this question elsewhere and I couldn't find an answer :

How many people in the project team have access to this accountant?

If it's more than one, can the other person(s) verify what Oru has said?

This accountant should have known the tax implications. And they should have had professional insurance to cover a mistake like this. That's what they are paid for.

[lordkator]

I'm sorry for casting aspersions or for any negative implications. But I saw this question elsewhere and I couldn't find an answer :

How many people in the project team have access to this accountant?

If it's more than one, can the other person(s) verify what Oru has said?

This accountant should have known the tax implications. And they should have had professional insurance to cover a mistake like this. That's what they are paid for.

I’ve addressed this “elsewhere” but as a repeat here:

I want to be clear, I know it's hard to understand the tax situation but its as real as death and I am personally contributing a large sum of money along with others on staff to just make it go away. I trust Oru deeply, I've spoken with him and I have spent many hours of my life with the core team working to make our environment work like a clock so we're all having fun. What is often not said or understood is the devs enjoy, well, being devs and we want the community to enjoy the results of our work. Meanwhile, it comes as a stab directly to the heart when trolls attack, we are just people like everyone else, we have lives, children, dogs, cats, and work and we come to this community contributing our skills to have fun and empower others to have fun. Its fun to think of conspiracy theories but Occam's razor teaches us the simplest explanation is most likely. I've seen the documents, I've used google translate to read them (hard but not impossible) and the situation satisfies me enough that I'm helping pay the bill directly with my own personal money. I've run companies for 25 years of my life and I know how complicated it can be, how expensive lawyers and accountants are and how easy it is to make a costly mistake. We were going to post the documents but then we noticed personal info like addresses and tax ids in them and we were concerned about exposing Oru to trolls in real life. Oru will need to redact them and post later but then they exist and have convinced me to act. We will learn from this event and find solutions to keep it from happening again.

[Hedge15]

I want to be clear, I know it's hard to understand the tax situation but its as real as death

This is the convincing part.

[Oru]

I'm sorry for casting aspersions or for any negative implications. But I saw this question elsewhere and I couldn't find an answer :

How many people in the project team have access to this accountant?

If it's more than one, can the other person(s) verify what Oru has said?

This accountant should have known the tax implications. And they should have had professional insurance to cover a mistake like this. That's what they are paid for.

I understand your concerns and i have updated the original post with the last tax balance sheet. Google translate loves this document but it is not hard to comprehend in this format either. Under 104 (general sales tax) you'll see a bunch of items dated back to 2018.01.01 (used them from 2015 to 2017, that's how it could be corrected), which were the missing taxes after Softlayer in Hungarian forints (HUF, 1 USD ~= 285 HUF). The other smaller amounts for 2018 are missing taxes for Slack.

Still struggling with redacting the tax office report because it was signed by them and it wasn't easy to remove that..

The whole situation is quite convoluted so i refrained from describing it to it's full extent to save readers time but i can explain it a little more now. So the main issue is that we were in contract with a US based company, bought services from them residing in Dallas TX and payed the bills in US dollars. Since they had an EU branch, seems they were obligated to bill us through this branch using the EU VAT system, which they indicated on the invoices with minuscule letters. None of us seen this of course but according to EU tax laws, this makes us, the buyers, responsible to report and occasionally pay the taxes. Reporting is one thing but the resolution whether we should pay taxes or not is quite complex. This consist of two things according to Hungarian taxation laws (yes there are local rules for this!). First you have to determine the place of fulfillment which in case of a tax-exempt company buying services is the site of the seller (Netherlands in case for Softlayer). That would have made Softlayer to pay local taxes and charge a higher bill but of course there is an exclusion for this in another section of the law which sais that in case of an electronic services, the place of fulfillment is the site of the seller. It describes several occasions for electronic services and while rented servers is not specifically listed, it is more or less evident that our case is included. The tax lawyer is still looking into this. Anyhow the story is still not over yet. So okay the place of fulfillment is Hungary but there is a 10k euro limit where you have to pay the 27% taxes from but you have to use a EUR to HUF conversion ratio fixed on a specific date (sometimes in 2016). So to determine this do we have to use the USD to HUF conversion ratio on this date or the date of the transaction? Or use the USD to EUR ratio? Anyhow, according to our interpretation we are only exceed a limit by a small amount, but the lawyer advised us to pay the taxes to get ahead of the possible fees (250% worst case) so we did not hesitate to pay because most likely the tax is due to be paid.

Now you think the story is over but once you'll see the tax office report and take the time to translate it, you will see they have raised another issue concerning your donations that could have made this situation even more complicated where we could require back taxes but made us pay taxes after the donations. Thankfully the lawyer took their claim apart, so i won't even describe it even further.

So tax issues are complicated. Company taxation are even more complicated. Company tax in Hungary is way more complicated thanks to legal uncertainty. Company taxes in Hungary over the EU system having a 3rd party contract to the US is beyond complicated as you can see. I can tell you that even the tax officers were scratching their heads along with the tax lawyer and still not completely sure about it..

[Praxi34]

I understand your concerns and i have updated the original post with the last tax balance sheet. Google translate loves this document but it is not hard to comprehend in this format either. Under 104 (general sales tax) you'll see a bunch of items dated back to 2018.01.01 (used them from 2015 to 2017, that's how it could be corrected), which were the missing taxes after Softlayer in Hungarian forints (HUF, 1 USD ~= 285 HUF). The other smaller amounts for 2018 are missing taxes for Slack.

Still struggling with redacting the tax office report because it was signed by them and it wasn't easy to remove that..

The whole situation is quite convoluted so i refrained from describing it to it's full extent to save readers time but i can explain it a little more now. So the main issue is that we were in contract with a US based company, bought services from them residing in Dallas TX and payed the bills in US dollars. Since they had an EU branch, seems they were obligated to bill us through this branch using the EU VAT system, which they indicated on the invoices with minuscule letters. None of us seen this of course but according to EU tax laws, this makes us, the buyers, responsible to report and occasionally pay the taxes. Reporting is one thing but the resolution whether we should pay taxes or not is quite complex. This consist of two things according to Hungarian taxation laws (yes there are local rules for this!). First you have to determine the place of fulfillment which in case of a tax-exempt company buying services is the site of the seller (Netherlands in case for Softlayer). That would have made Softlayer to pay local taxes and charge a higher bill but of course there is an exclusion for this in another section of the law which sais that in case of an electronic services, the place of fulfillment is the site of the seller. It describes several occasions for electronic services and while rented servers is not specifically listed, it is more or less evident that our case is included. The tax lawyer is still looking into this. Anyhow the story is still not over yet. So okay the place of fulfillment is Hungary but there is a 10k euro limit where you have to pay the 27% taxes from but you have to use a EUR to HUF conversion ratio fixed on a specific date (sometimes in 2016). So to determine this do we have to use the USD to HUF conversion ratio on this date or the date of the transaction? Or use the USD to EUR ratio? Anyhow, according to our interpretation we are only exceed a limit by a small amount, but the lawyer advised us to pay the taxes to get ahead of the possible fees (250% worst case) so we did not hesitate to pay because most likely the tax is due to be paid.

Now you think the story is over but once you'll see the tax office report and take the time to translate it, you will see they have raised another issue concerning your donations that could have made this situation even more complicated where we could require back taxes but made us pay taxes after the donations. Thankfully the lawyer took their claim apart, so i won't even describe it even further.

So tax issues are complicated. Company taxation are even more complicated. Company tax in Hungary is way more complicated thanks to legal uncertainty. Company taxes in Hungary over the EU system having a 3rd party contract to the US is beyond complicated as you can see. I can tell you that even the tax officers were scratching their heads along with the tax lawyer and still not completely sure about it..

Thanks for spending time explaining that! My head hurts but I get the jist! Your doing an amazing job!!!

[nee2earth]

and i have updated the original post with the last tax balance sheet. .

Not sure how it's displaying on your end but i think when you edited your OP, it converted all your original text into GRAY font (makes it extremely difficult or impossible to read, depending upon the browser) .

Anyways no biggie but just figured i'd let you know.

Thanks again for the continued details & elaborations.

[Vlada]

Not sure how it's displaying on your end but i think when you edited your OP, it converted all your original text into GRAY font (makes it extremely difficult or impossible to read, depending upon the browser) .

I fixed it

[ljay1973]

I'm sorry for casting aspersions or for any negative implications. But I saw this question elsewhere and I couldn't find an answer :

How many people in the project team have access to this accountant?

If it's more than one, can the other person(s) verify what Oru has said?

This accountant should have known the tax implications. And they should have had professional insurance to cover a mistake like this. That's what they are paid for.

I've followed and interacted with this project since its earliest days. For quite a while now I've been unable to do much more than float in the far background of the forums. This has pulled me back to the keyboard!

I can honestly say that, in the past, there were members of the team who I wouldn't have trusted with the dead skin from the bottom of my feet, let alone money!
However, I personally feel complete trust in the current team to deliver on the goal in an honest manner.
I've watched on helpless as a very close friend lost their business they built from nothing through 20 years of hard, hard graft. lost their home, lost everything, all due to the incompetence of their tax accountant. Said accountant admitted fully to the mother of all f*** ups over a number of years, yet the accountant walked away with no repercussions while my friend lost everything. So please keep in mind that even a poor accountant will usually make sure their arse is covered but care not for their clients when it comes down to it.
Any negative reflection on the team here, from us on the outside, is baseless.


edit.....
oops, forgot to add
To the devs, support etc.. of SWGEMU. You do an amazing job, and will always have my gratitude.