Time Is Money

It’s bad enough that we have to pay taxes. The last thing a company wants is to spend months figuring out how much to pay. User-friendly tax codes have now become a key selling point for countries trying to entice business. Ireland’s easy-to-use code — it takes an average of only 76 hours for a ...

It's bad enough that we have to pay taxes. The last thing a company wants is to spend months figuring out how much to pay. User-friendly tax codes have now become a key selling point for countries trying to entice business. Ireland's easy-to-use code -- it takes an average of only 76 hours for a company to prepare, file, and pay taxes there, according to the World Bank's report Doing Business 2007 -- has helped make it a magnet for foreign investment. The most time-consuming place for a business to pay taxes is Brazil, where the process takes an incredible 2,600 hours. By contrast, it takes a mere 30 hours in Singapore, the easiest place to do business in the world. Here's how others add up:

It’s bad enough that we have to pay taxes. The last thing a company wants is to spend months figuring out how much to pay. User-friendly tax codes have now become a key selling point for countries trying to entice business. Ireland’s easy-to-use code — it takes an average of only 76 hours for a company to prepare, file, and pay taxes there, according to the World Bank’s report Doing Business 2007 — has helped make it a magnet for foreign investment. The most time-consuming place for a business to pay taxes is Brazil, where the process takes an incredible 2,600 hours. By contrast, it takes a mere 30 hours in Singapore, the easiest place to do business in the world. Here’s how others add up:

 Country  Hours*
 Maldives  0
 United Arab Emirates  12
 New Zealand  70
 United Kingdom  105
 France  128
 Russia  256
 India  264
 United States  325
 Japan  350
 China  872

*Time it takes to prepare, file, and pay the corporate income tax, the value added tax, and social security contributions (in hours per year).

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