Papers and Permissions II
As always, I’m not a lawyer, and this isn’t legal advice. If you need that, go find someone with a law degree and a billable hour rate.
I think I promised that we were going to contact manufacturers the next time I write… Well, apparently not. Welcome back to the legal jungle!
Besides registering with the Secretary of State, I also needed to make a case with the IRS, filing for an Employer Identification Number. NOTE: THEY ONLY GIVE YOU THIS NUMBER ONCE! If you lose it, they can’t find it, and they can’t help.
Moreover, for the state of Washington, the Department of Revenue (DoR) handles the business licensing process for you. By taking the Unified Business Identifier number given by the SoS, you can file everything with the DoR online, making the process a touch nicer.
This is probably a good place to talk about scam emails, texts, phone calls, and letters. When you register your business, most of the contact information you submit will be made public, as I discussed in part 1 of this miniseries. There are many, many “services” who will “kindly” send you letters offering their “warnings and assistance”. I have received countless letters made to look like government-issued warnings about fines or fees. I use 3 tips to identify these:
Read the fine print. Most of these people are not trying to break the law. They are not running “scams” so much as forcing their services upon you in an immoral way. Thus, they cannot say that they “are” the actual government, so most of them will print a disclaimer in the fine print.
Check their TLD. Almost all government websites are verified by the “.gov” Top-Level Domain. If you see some email addresses or sites along the lines of: “this-is-a-government-site.com”, probably don’t click on it.
Check their address. On letter mail, check the sender address on the envelope; again, an official government sender address should be obvious. If it is a random street address or a mysterious PO box, you know it is not legitimate.
Caption: Legitimate letter from the Department of Revenue.