Ant Hill Incorporation: When will it work?

[nibot]

Documents submitted to the Department of State on behalf of Ant Hill Co-op. May 8, 2006.

Incorporation with the State is supposed to be a relatively simple matter. Mail a form to the state with a moderate filing fee, and, presto! you've created a corporation. Instead it turns out to be a huge pain in the ass.

We have just submitted our documents for a fifth time. Two of the previous submissions were simply silently lost. The other two were rejected for fairly simple reasons. The first: they didn't like our declared purpose, which included in part , "any other legal activity approved by the members." Fair enough. We removed a bunch of semi-extraneous items from our statement of purpose and resubmitted. Next time: they rejected our documents because we allegedly paid the wrong fee (which I had previously discussed and clarified via a telephone conversion with someone at the Department of State), and because I had stapled the documents incorrectly. Fair enough. Resubmit. The documents go into the void. So, now a fifth submission. Hopefully this one will take, and after a year of trying, we will be a corporation. But I am not holding my breath.

You can pay a $25 "rush" fee and they'll look at your documents within 24 hours of receiving them. You can pay more, I think it's $100, and they'll look at them the same day they receive them. You can pay even more and have your documents processed in two hours. My first mistake was to extrapolate from these numbers and assume that if you just paid the statutory filing fee without any rush service, it would take, oh, maybe a week. But it turns out that if you don't pay a rush fee, the processing time is unbounded. There is no way to check on the status of a submission, either. Hence the emphasis on "24 hour Rush."

Sending documents to the New York State Government is probably a more secure way of destroying them than any kind of shredding yet invented.

Comments

[nibot.livejournal.com]

That is true. The telephone company wanted to double or quadruple our rates, so we just left the phone line / DSL in the name of an individual (farmckon!). However, the energy supplier (Rochester Gas and Electric) didn't give us any trouble at all, and our rates are the same. In their case, the buildings for which we have electricity and gas accounts are still zoned as residential, so they don't care whether the bill is handled by an individual or a corporation (as probably happens quite frequently with property management companies that cover utilities for their tenants).