The nice thing about small and local companies and people is that they can be taxed and various fees can be levied. People and small companies cannot so easily change their locale so they must pay these fees to to local governments. The situation is much different for large companies and multinationals, they owe allegiance to their shareholders and can reasonably easily move factories and offices to take advantage of various resources or tax codes.
Governments are not especially fond of this fact being rubbed into their face, but as long as the companies are providing local jobs and some taxes they are to be tolerated. But there is another player who also exists in the play somewhere between honest citizens and tolerable multinationals, the external consultant. These people have the mercenary approach of the multinational and are less favored as they may do things to actually reduce their taxes, but they do not bring in factories or offices.
In addition to this they do not have marketing departments nor lobbyist firms to argue their case, so this is a very convenient group for governments to take focus on – reasonably defenseless and who are trying to reduce what taxes they pay.
So I was not surprised to hear that 2014 had ushered in a new law in Germany which at first I misunderstood. The law was designed in a rather odd way, it was to tax any reimbursed expenses that exceeded a one thousand euros per month.
A few questions later, I discovered that this was actually intended to be for people who were working at a location for 48 months or longer. Yet the other thing was this law was actually aimed at regular employees who simply happen to be working at another company for four or more years. Yup, if you rent a car, take a train, or fly to the customers site and stay in a hotel each week, you would easily exceed this threshold. In effect you would actually be paying taxes on your own expenses for the privilege to work for your employer at his customer.