Most foreign founders arrive in Belarus with an audit rule of thumb borrowed from home. In the EU, small companies are usually exempt, while in some jurisdictions every subsidiary is audited. Neither assumption holds in Minsk. Belarusian law decides who needs a statutory audit by status, size and a handful of specific events — not […]
Most foreign founders carry the same mental model into a distribution. The subsidiary earns a profit, profit tax is paid, the shareholders declare a dividend, and the money lands in the parent’s account minus a single withholding line. It is a clean picture, and for a company incorporated in a calmer jurisdiction it would mostly […]
In international business, the right base can quietly reshape your margins. Georgia, sitting at the crossroads of Eastern Europe and Western Asia, has spent the last decade turning itself into a magnet for technology companies, borrowing heavily from the Estonian model of taxing profit only when it leaves the business. For IT founders the appeal […]
Ask a foreign founder what VAT their Belarusian High-Tech Park entity pays, and the answer is almost always the same: “Nothing — we’re exempt.” It is a reasonable belief, and most of the time it produces the right number. But it is the wrong mental model, and the gap between the model and the mechanics […]
Most EOR invoices get paid on trust. One lands at the start of the month, the total is close to last month’s, and someone in finance signs it off before lunch. That holds up right until it doesn’t — until a leaver turns out to have been paid for two months after they left, or […]
Most foreign technology groups arrive in Belarus with a familiar structure: a parent company in the US, the EU, the UK, or the UAE owns a Belarusian entity that writes code, runs an R&D function, or maintains a product for the group. Money moves between them constantly — the local company invoices the parent for […]
An engineer on your Belarusian team flies to a conference in Warsaw. Three days, one hotel, a train, a handful of taxis, and dinners with two prospective partners. The engineer pays for most of it herself and expects the money back. From headquarters this looks like a line item someone approves in an afternoon. On […]
Most foreign IT companies approaching Belarus’s High-Tech Park treat the business plan as paperwork — a template to populate on the way to a 1% tax regime. That assumption is the single most reliable predictor of a difficult admission. The HTP business plan is not a registration form. It is the document on which a […]
When a foreign company hires someone in Belarus through an Employer of Record, one of the quiet reassurances that makes the model attractive is “taxes are taken care of.” For the salary that runs through payroll every month, that is entirely true. The EOR withholds income tax, pays it to the budget, and files what […]
Most companies join the High-Tech Park with one business model in mind and end up running a slightly — or substantially — different one a year or two later. A custom development shop lands on a product idea and starts selling subscriptions. A SaaS company adds a consulting line. A fintech studio decides to run […]
When a foreign company hires through an Employer of Record in Belarus, it rarely feels like standing up a cross-border data operation. It feels like hiring an engineer. But the moment that engineer signs a Belarusian employment contract, personal data starts to move — full name, home address, tax and social-insurance identifiers, salary, bank details, […]
Three founders walk into the same HTP intake meeting. One runs a B2B SaaS company selling subscriptions to European enterprises. One runs a custom development shop shipping code to a handful of US clients. One runs a marketplace connecting freelance designers with small businesses across the EU. On paper, all three want the same thing […]
