I thought that I’d left all of the bureaucracy behind when I left Belgium earlier this year, but no. It seems that not content with foisting their arcane machinations on the rest of Europe, the Belgians have now set their sights on the global stage.
On July 15th, a new law will come into effect in Belgium whereby any non-residents who work in Belgium for more than five days in any calendar month are required to obtain an L-1 LIMOSA declaration. Given that there’s an extremely good chance I’ll be sent back to Belgium on a business trip at some stage or other (what with half my department still being based there), I’m likely to get hit by this sooner or later, which means that business trips will now take just that little bit more justification.
It’s pain enough that a business traveler now has an additional hoop to jump through (on top of the work permit non-EU travelers still have to obtain), but this declaration can only be obtained by the traveller’s employer. Worse, companies have to apply for a company registration number to the Belgian authorities before they can even apply for the declarations for their employees.
Given that Belgium is The Centre of Europe (TM), and is home to the European Union, NATO, and hundreds of multinational corporations, all of whom are in the habit of importing workers for short periods of time, this new law will simply generate massive amounts of extra effort and paperwork. Luckily, the Belgians have a vast and well-experienced Civil Service to cope with it. Unfortunately, most companies do not have such vast resources standing idly by just waiting for additional paperwork to push. For a company such as the one I’m working for, who are sending people over to Brussels on a fairly regular basis, the company registration isn’t too bad as a one-off (although the increased administrative effort required for every business trip is just another case of death by a thousand cuts), but for small companies or consultancy firms considering sending people to Belgium for small pieces of work, it may just not be worth the effort.
The Belgian authorities claim that this measure will allow them to “monitor the employment of non-Belgians in Belgium”. But what they mean here is that it will allow them to better identify people who they think should be paying tax in Belgium. And although no registration or filing fees have been mentioned yet, it can’t be long before the Belgians start using this as another way of increasing their revenue. And no doubt they’ll insist on fees being paid by purchasing lick-and-stick stamps – at a Belgian post office – and physically sticking these to the L1 declaration!
Limosa is the Latin name of an African bird that migrates to the Low Countries (Northern Belgium and the Netherlands) every year. Ironically, the Belgians will only discourage people from visiting their country at all with this law.
With apologies to the Belgian friends I left behind. I didn’t mean you, I meant those other assholes. [Reference to Natural Born Killers, in case you missed it.]
Leave a Reply