Labor Compliance Office Joins Hall of Shame
Labor Compliance Office is one of many companies that use fear of the law and subterfuge to extract money from naive owners of small businesses. What is interesting about LCO, however, is that it focuses on compliance with labor laws rather than corporate laws.
One of my clients brought Labor Compliance Office to my attention. (As agent for service of process for several other clients, I had already received copies of LCO’s pink-accented NOTICE.) Fortunately, even though the notice looks like it came from a governmental entity (the disclaimer is not readily apparent), my client was not taken in by the threat of fines up to $17,000.
Labor Compliance Office proposes to help the reader’s business avoid such fines by providing for $275 a poster that includes all notices required by California and federal labor laws. In addition, the business receives:
So how important is this legal stuff, anyway?
Two recently-acquired clients had similar situations that brought up the importance of complying with legal requirements.
Each company is a multi-founder startup where one founder became non-productive, and even somewhat detrimental to the business. The other founders wanted to move the problem founder off to the side, where he could cause no more trouble, in a manner that would be fair to everyone involved.
Unfortunately, each company had failed to comply with some of the most basic legal requirements: Holding annual shareholder meetings to elect directors, annual board of director meetings to appoint officers, etc. As a result, in each instance we had to spend time and money taking corporate actions, and recording those actions appropriately in meeting minutes, before the real problem could be solved.
