IT | Data Privacy | E-Commerce
Legal
The Internet is not a legal vacuum but is interspersed with a multitude of legal regulations from the most diverse fields of law. Due to the constant development and increasing demand for cloud solutions and outsourcing, companies need more and more consulting services for modern media.
The relevant fields of law include copyright law, competition law, e-commerce law, international private law, name and trademark law, data protection law as well as media and telecommunications law. A breach of the relevant regulations often leads – even without culpable conduct – to the user's liability being established and/or a warning letter being issued. Therefore, legally sound advice in line with the user's interests is indispensable. Our experts will be happy to assist you in this context.
Our advising professionals, especially the lawyers and specialist lawyers, have extensive experience in the field of Internet law. Our consulting services adopt a practical and solution-oriented approach. Great importance is attached to ensuring the clarity of the solution and that the solutions found are supported by you.
Taxes
One of our tax focuses in this area is in e-commerce, meaning that we provide tax advice to online retailers or trading companies with web shops. In this respect, the focus is on solutions for the correct preparation of financial accounting, annual financial statements and tax returns.
The challenge in these activities is the comprehensive and correct determination of tax-relevant transactions since many of them are strictly virtual. The extraction of data from Amazon, PayPal or eBay accounts, or accounts with comparable providers, poses a special challenge. Such extraction cannot be achieved manually but requires the correct setup of IT interfaces. This is the only way to ensure that all the tax-relevant data is properly transferred.
However, implementing these requirements means that only employees with the necessary IT literacy and who are willing to deal with these issues can be deployed. And we can guarantee that with the employees entrusted with these tasks in our firm!
A further focus of our tax consulting services is the area of cryptocurrencies. Ever since the Bitcoin price surges, the tax authorities have been taking a particular interest in ensuring the correct tax treatment of these transactions. So far, however, the tax authorities have failed to provide any valid guidance for most Bitcoin-related areas.
Nevertheless, the related tax obligations must already be complied with. For example, the mining of cryptocurrencies may be attributable to the commercial sector. However, the operations should still be routinely assigned to the private sector. Be this at it may, the development of cryptocurrencies is incredibly fast, resulting in significant peculiarities, the tax treatment of which is not always obvious at first glance in the context of familiar regulations. From our point of view, it is important to establish that terms like mining, pool mining, cloud mining, hard forks, bounties, air drops etc. are by no means new to us and that we can present the tax authorities with reliable solutions for all these processes.
Apart from this, we will of course be happy to answer any other questions that may arise in the field of IT-related tax advice.
Business audits
In this area, our current focus is on the statutory audit of large online retailers. One of the largest online retailers in Germany is one of our clients.
The audit of large online retailers differs from traditional audits in several different ways. The considerable significance of what are referred to as mass data analyses is especially noteworthy. With mass data analyses, the large number of bookings is automatically evaluated based on IT evaluations following the definition of relevant parameters and then summarised in evaluation protocols. In this respect, the fine art of auditing is to determine reliable and comprehensible parameters, thus achieving the necessary certainty regarding the compliance and accuracy of the accounting and annual accounts.
But IT system auditing is also of special significance. It is already firmly established in our firm and continues to be regularly expanded.
