Tom in London wrote:
I think this whole thing is ridiculous. If I issue an invoice, isn't it ****ing obvious that my tax residency address (no matter where it is) is the address on the invoice, that the invoice is de facto a legally binding document, and that should any of the information on it turn out to be false, I could risk very severe legal penalties including incarceration?
How stupid would you have to be to think otherwise?
In my past (bitter) experience working in Italy (and I suspect Spain may be similar), there is an assumption that every bit of information you provide, such as your address, is in fact false, and you therefore have to prove that it isn't. This generates a potentially endless chain of bureaucracy, because in turn you then have to prove that any official document you may provide, proving that the information you gave is not false, is itself not false. I used to spend, on average, one week out of every four obtaining documents as backup for other documents which should have been completely unnecessary anyway.
I didn't really understand Kafka until I went to live in Italy. Now I'm back in the UK, a place where despite its many faults as compared to Italy, there is an assumption that you are acting honestly and in good faith in all your business transactions; the corollary being that if it turns out you're not, you will find the authorities coming down on you like a ton of bricks.
I miss many things about Italy but Italian bureaucracy is not one of them. In the end, that was what drove me away from Italy - with deep regret - because the bureaucracy made it impossible for me to continue living there. Native Italians have their own ways of dealing with their country's bureaucracy but for a non-Italian like me, with a name that stands out as "foreign", everything was much more difficult.
Thanks for reading. I feel better now
[Edited at 2020-09-02 09:36 GMT]