Dear folks
I and my wife are both foreigners with work-permit ARC here in Taiwan. We have studied and then worked here for almost 7 year (undergraduate and master degrees) so we can speak Chinese/English well. My wife is quite an enthusiast in making Vietnamese Foods (we are Vietnamese) and she is very interested to start a small business by selling Vietnamese food on a small movable food store (like other Taiwanese did)
The first way: We plan to hire some student to run that stores as part-time worker (those students must have legal student work-permit for sure). And my wife will be the host to make food at our home.
The other way is to only make food at home and selling it online via Taiwanese web, Facebook and other webpage. We have experiences in opening and running a online store on several Taiwanese webs too. The delivery is no problem.
My question is if we do the first way, Is there any procedure we need to follows Taiwanese government rules?
If we do by the second way, should we have to pay taxes etc?
Your experiences and advice are highly appriciated
Your best bet is to hire an accountant to advise you. Tax rules are quite strict for businesses and if you fail to comply with them, you could be in big trouble.
On the other hand, rules are much less strict for small businesses. Below a certain turnover (which is quite high - a couple of million?) you don’t need to register for a 統一編號, and you can opt to just pay a flat rate of VAT, which makes life a lot easier. More than likely, you’ll only need an accountant to set up the business for you and advise on procedure.
For a food business, you need to comply with basic food-preparation rules, but again these are quite liberal for food-cart type businesses. Just basic common sense. An accountant will probably know how to deal with this too.
I think it will be the same either way - you can’t escape by being online-only! The gov’t is especially keeping an eye on eBay businesses, but if you already have some experience in this area, I assume you know how this works already.
The only difference with online work is (obviously) you don’t actually need to operate the food cart. You still need to report your income/tax liability and have your kitchen checked for compliance. I suppose it depends how much business you do - I know some people who run a successful food stand from a rather untidy kitchen and don’t seem to have any contact with the authorities. OTOH, that’s in a little nowhere town. Taipei is a different planet.