William A. Price, Attorney at Law
The New York Times this week described an asset forfeiture case involving a restaurant with routine cash deposits of less than $10,000. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/14/us/irs-asset-forfeiture-case-is-dropped-.html?_r=0 Take-away: Get the information for a Form 8300, including taxpayer information numbers, for cash payments, even those involving non-terrorist items like Iowa eggs and bacon for breakfast, or risk equivalent (and unjustified) government…
DetailsMore than three quarters of all businesses in the US are family run. (The proportion is even higher elsewhere.) Family ownership means that family relationships, for good or for bad, often trump (or at least complicate) whatever the corporate documents say should be done about distribution of profits; hiring, firing, and promotion of managers; purchase…
DetailsThe only worse thing than clients is – not having clients. When you do get them, how likely are they to pay you? This is worse for some service providers than for others. Auto repair and other service providers such as computer stores, which get items from customers, can be sued for conversion (and prosecuted for theft) …
DetailsUS Thanksgiving reminds me to make a list every year of all the things that have gone well, and all the friends, clients, referral sources, and others who I’ve been able to work with during the year. This doesn’t mean that all the feelings of the season are good. They never have been. The Mayflower…
DetailsThe traditional sources of funding, for companies that don’t expect to grow enough to pay 50 times investment in two years (a tech angel funder’s demand) or 10x in two years (venture capital’s demand), while giving up control of their business, are: a. Factoring: Business factors deal with multi-billion dollar funds like Bibby (http://www.bibbyusa.com/) to…
DetailsFifield and Enterprise Finance Group, Inc. v. Premier Dealer Services, Inc., 2013 IL App. (1st) 120327 held that unless a guarantee of at least two years of employment is made, Illinois courts would not enforce a noncompete agreement, even where the signer is an applicant for a new job. California is even more rigorous, limiting…
DetailsOwners of part of a business who guarantee auto or other asset loans for the company do not get title to the asset for which the loan is made. They may or may not even get credit for a capital contribution to the company, depending on the internal organizational agreements (partnership agreement for a partnership,…
DetailsThere are two times that business partners argue: when they have money, and when they don’t. Those alternatives cover all available time segments, so if you’re advising people on how they should organize their business, some rules for the arguments may be in order. The classic horror story about such arguments is the Illinois appellate…
DetailsJust met with a potential client who wanted advice on whether to form an S corporation “to do everything legally required” for a new business. He wants to export clothing, cars, and food to Africa. I reminded him about the tax benefits (no Social Security/Medicaid taxes on S distributions) and disadvantages (franchise taxes) of sub…
DetailsA recent Stanford study of P/e (private equity) owned company CEO compensation across 144 sample firms found the following: “To summarize the key results in this section, we find that, relative to public corporations, on average, PE-owned firms: (i) provide the CEO with 2.3 percentage points more equity (that is, nearly twice as much equity as…
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