The user of this, the currently most advanced public service so far in Croatia receives accurate documentation from public registers. Meet Start.gov.hr, the first real step into Croatia’s desperately needed digital transformation.
As Poslovni Dnevnik/Suzana Varosanec writes on the 2nd of December, 2019, Start.gov.hr, a new digital service launched by the Ministry of Economy to help people start a business, is designed to support as many as 200,000 users.
It has been available for public since the 1st of December, 2019, and it remains to be seen how many of the otherwise 15,000 new Croatian companies will choose to use this new service annually. It is currently Croatia’s most advanced public service, integrating numerous partners, databases and registers, so it will only take two to three days to start a new business, as opposed to waiting in line after line and being asked for things which can only be described as insane by pan-faced state employees. At this stage, only what are known as ”physical” persons from Croatia can use the service, but in 2020, it is expected that foreign company founders will also be able to utilise it.
IT solutions for Start.gov.hr have been developed by Fina and will maintain and develop a system whose benefits for the founders of small companies are enormous. In addition to being fast and significantly shortening the average of about 25 days to register a company, as well as skipping numerous visits to notaries, just one entry and one step is required. The e-citizen (e-građanin) system is accessed by the user themselves (there’s no power of attorney) with a Level 4 credential to authenticate the certificate. Stepping into creating your own business now means merely filling out a unique online form that takes up to half an hour to complete.
What Start.gov.hr’s form is, is a type of registry with the name of the company (there is a search engine to see what is taken and what isn’t), activities and the TC amount, and a set of statements, one of which needs to be able to show the absence of any debts to the state. Specifically, the tax debt check is left for the first phase of the upgrade. For everything that follows and what sets the Start.gov.hr system apart from the rest of the market and from Hitro.hr, is that the user receives accurate and standardised documentation from public registers. This is an result of the interconnectedness of the relevant institutions, and the startup business is simplified.
After the application is completed, from the next click, everything is done by partner institutions, ie, for the first time all stakeholders are integrated, from the CBS, to the Tax Administration and HZMO onwards, in total there are about 10 institutions which are all connected. The cost is minimal and excluding the share capital payment (TC), the startup fee is 30 kuna for a simple d.o.o., 200 kuna for a normal d.o.o. and 250 kuna for an obrt. In order to reduce the possibility of errors, all fields filled in by the user, along with the instructions, have logical controls, and in order not to enter information for other persons there are ample security settings.
In the case of more than one founder, they receive a message from one that the documentation has been prepared and an invitation to sign a social contract with their OIB and to pay the TC. For this, a special account is opened to which the money is paid via credit or debit card (Visa, Maestro and Mastercard). The transfer of money will go to the transaction account as soon as it is opened, which is already possible with PBZ and Erste Bank, and according to announcements, will also soon be available with RBA, Addiko Bank and Zagrebačka banka.
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