Opinion – Mihai Maierean
As an entrepreneur, one of your challenges is managing costs so that your profit is as motivating as possible. Business costs include taxes we owe to the state that can be variable or fixed. Among th
e questions I received from entrepreneurs in my 12 years of experience was the question, “How do I pay as little tax as possible to the state?”. The question usually has two meanings. The first sense is that the entrepreneur is not looking for tax optimization, but simply would like to pay less. I’m going to answer cle
arly and firmly: You can’t pay less taxes than the law requires. The second relates to tax optimization, which, of course, can be analyzed and carried out within the limits of the Tax Code (I will come back in another article with some suggestions of
tax optimization). Regarding the first sense, I invite you now to make a small change of approach, bearing in mind that in Romania the tax system for companies is the lowest in Europe (Corporate tax of 16% vs 22.5% European average, Dividend tax of 5% Romania vs 23.5% and , most importantly, tax on micro income of 1-3% in Ro
mania). I don’t know why most entrepreneurs avoid taxes, but when I paid the first 50 RON micro tax I felt very proud that I managed to contribute an amount from my company to the GDP of the country. And here I’m actually going to change the question a little bit instead of giving the answer to the question in the title: Aren’t taxes really a psychological blockage that we’re hitting on in the business? Have we been able to optimise all the other costs of the business and have reached taxes and this cost represents such a large percentag
e that influences our profit? What is, in fact, the real reason we’re so bothered by taxes? I would answer: inefficient management of money by the state. Because we pay so many taxes and we see that we don’t get the infrastructure services we need. It really is a pretty relevant reason to avoid taxes. But even so, is it worth wasting our energy on tax avoidance? Are they so relevant and have such a large percentage of profit that they deserve tax optimization? If you’ve done your budget and your taxes are such a big percentage, it means that business revenues are too low. You can also try tax optimization variants in this context. But will you get the profit you want by this method? If you can’t increase revenue, and tax optimization doesn’t help, it means your business isn’t really profitable because of the costs you have left. You know how they say: Do you mind it raining or you learn to dance in the rain, in both cases it will still rain
. So it is with taxes. You trip over these (sometimes irrelevant) costs or learn to include them in your budget and optimize them as much as possible. And focus the energy on the relevant revenues and costs. Why do taxes bother you? I await the response in the comments.
Mihai Mairean – Accounting expe
rtA figure you don’t know, you can’t change it!