The tax office won't remind you

Today was DIAN day: the Colombian tax authority, in person, because their system spent three weeks unable to talk to the chamber of commerce, so what should have been automatic became bus rides and paperwork. The one-hour errand took over two ▸ 2:20. The official who helped us recited tax articles from memory with his eyes closed, like Doctor Strange scanning futures ▸ 5:12.

What we actually signed up for

We entered the “simple” tax regime, the one designed to be friendly to new companies. The friendliness includes: monthly income declarations, a second filing every two months, electronic invoicing within two months, a beneficial-owners declaration, and roughly ten government portals of homework ▸ 3:45. Miss a deadline and fines accrue per day; fall far enough behind and you get expelled into the ordinary regime with far worse terms ▸ 3:58. Our partner Carlos left the room genuinely scared ▸ 3:08.

So I asked the obvious question: does the portal at least notify us before a deadline? The answer was simply no ▸ 8:01.

la vaquita de leche →

The teaching

The system is built assuming you track it: deadlines that depend on the last digit of your tax ID, penalties that read like loan-shark interest, and no reminders. It works less like a service and more like a mechanism where the distracted entrepreneur is the revenue source, the government’s milk cow ▸ 19:32.

Which means compliance is not an accountant’s detail you’ll deal with someday. It’s a founder skill, day one: a calendar with every obligation, checked like the product backlog. Nobody upstream is going to warn you. Now I understand, viscerally, why starting a company filters people. That filter, it turns out, is also the moat: next entry…