[arin-ppml] Of interest?

[Paul McNary]

Ronald
A Sole Proprietorship 1040 Schedule C does not have to be registered 
with the State of Missouri.
Your Social Security Number is all that is required.
Department of revenue issues you a number for Sales Tax and Withholding 
Taxes.
The Feds give you a Withholding employer ID.
However you do not have to have anything recorded with the Secretary of 
State.
So I have had problems with ARIN not being able to authorize my business.
You don't have to be incorporated in any state to have a legal business.

On 5/18/2019 9:38 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette wrote:
> In message <BEEB33F0-D800-4099-B5A7-8AD232DC8B5F at arin.net>,
> John Curran <jcurran at arin.net> wrote:
>
>> On May 18, 2019, at 5:06 PM, Ronald F. Guilmette <rfg at tristatelogic.com> wr=
>> ote:
>>> And as I have already asserted, ARIN would have done well... and done
>>> better than it has done... to have at least made itself aware of these
>>> facts.  If it had done so, then perhaps appropriate questions could
>>> have been raised about all of this much much earlier, at the outset,
>>> some 4+ years ago.
>> Ronald -
>>
>> However, it is quite likely that the state registration issue would have
>> been promptly corrected once raised, at which point we would have ended up
>> with the same outcome.
> It's an arguably valid point, but I disagree, for the following reasons.
>
> It's one thing to try to run a fraud against a non-governmental private
> non-profit organization, like ARIN, which has both a strong incentive
> never to litigate and also a strong and widely-known history of vitrually
> never doing so.  It is quite another thing entirely to commit a fraud
> where the gateway requirement to begin the scam is to perpetrate at least
> a portion of the fraud against one or more of these United States.
>
> State attorneys general have rather more financial backing than does ARIN,
> and they are, I think, rather entirely less likely to just let stuff
> slide, e.g. for fear of being bankrupted as a side-effect of litigation.
>
> Additionally, there are a number of fundamental principals involved here,
> and these should not be overlooked.  I'm talking about longstanding
> principals of both law and commerce that should never be violated under
> any circumstances.
>
> Wherever you are, within the ARIN region, just look down the street at
> you local bookshop, your local corner drug store, or your local hair salon.
> These businesses are all formally registered to do business in your state,
> you province, or your country.  Why then should *any* Internet business
> which also and likewise maintains a physical nexus to your state be somehow
> magically immune from fufilling this normative legal requirement that
> everyone else has to satisfy?  (In fact, under law, they aren't.  All
> businesses with a physical nexus must register.  No exceptions.)
>
> More to the point, why should ARIN ever be, in effect, materially aiding
> and abetting -any- business in illegally skirting that business' state tax
> liability?  And likewise, why should ARIN be, in effect, materially aiding
> and abetting any business as it skirts its home state's reasonable state
> business regulations?  (You know, the ones that the voters of a given state
> have, through their legislatures, adopted for the common good.)
>
> The answer, I think, is that it shouldn't.  ARIN should not be aiding and
> abetting tax evasion, money laundering or any of the other myriad crimes
> and misdemeanors that the people of your state, or my state, have, in their
> wisdom, deemed either criminal or actionable.
>
> A lot of people seem to still be operating under this popular delusion that
> "Internet businesses" can and do somehow float freely, somehere in the
> intangible ether, totally unmoored from the legal realities that we poor
> mere mortals, living here on terra firma, have to contend with every day
> of our professional lives.  But through the courts, and largely thanks
> to Amazon, we have already had this question asked and answered.  The
> answer is no, if you have a physical nexus in a state, you *cannot* simply
> or unilaterally elect to *not* register in that state, and likewise you
> *cannot* simply duck out on you state tax liability.  (You also have to
> obey state labor laws and so forth.)  Using the word "Internet" is not a
> magic get-out-of-jail-free card that absolves you from state taxes or
> state regulation.
>
> So now, how many dollars did Oppobox pay in state taxes to the state of
> Ohio during its alleged four year tenure in that state?  The answer is
> self-evidently zero.  But the company did apparently make a good deal of
> revenue, over those same four years, from the large chunks of IP address
> space that were issued to it.  So it is reasonable to ask: Issued by whom?
> Who granted this fiction of an "Ohio" company a nice profitable concession,
> from which they made plenty of dough even while never paying a dime in
> state taxes?
>
> One type of business that quite certainly does float freely, unmoored,
> most of the time anyway, from terra firma is an airline.  So if, for example,
> Southwest Airlines applies for landing rights at the Cincinnati airport,
> would airport authorities be acting properly if they didn't even check to
> see if Southwest Airlines was or was not even registered to do business
> in Ohio?  No, they would not.  And in fact Southwest Airlines *is* properly
> registered in the State of Ohio, as it should be and as it must be.  If
> Southwest had landed even a single plane at the Cincinnati airport before
> the company's Ohio corporate registration was in place, then somebody on
> the airport commission would be out of a job by now.
>
> I see no reason why the normal and normative longstanding rules of commerce
> and law should be either ignored or flaunted by ARIN.  Before granting a
> commercially valuable concession to any arbitrary commercial entity X,
> alleged to be located in state Y, it is both normal practice and entirely
> appropriate to check that X really is registered to do business in state Y.
> The fact that ARIN apparently *isn't* doing these simple checks makes ARIN
> an outlier and an anomaly... a quirky bizzare misfit among all of the
> eminently reasonable governmental and non-profit entities that have been
> doing these simple and appropriate checks, day and and day out, for decades.
>
> Now, in this present Micfo case, the whole thing has blown up in a rather
> spectacular fashion.  We have Grand Jury indictments, federal marshals,
> the works.  It's certainly an excellent show, and I look forward to the
> video(s).  But what about all of the *other* stuff that's still quietly
> hiding in the cracks and crevices, even as we speak?  What about all of the
> "Internet" businesses that *aren't* suing ARIN and that *aren't* defrauding
> ARIN and that are only just off in some quiet corner of ARIN-land someplace,
> quietly and only defrauding their home states of tax revenue, even as they
> are making money, hand over fist, by reselling various bits of what ARIN
> has bequeathed to them?
>
> I know what people here will say.  They will say "ARIN isn't the state tax
> police and we adamantly do not *want* ARIN to be the state tax police."
> It's an old refrain and I know it well.  But it utterly misses one vital
> nunace.
>
> Nobody wants ARIN to enforce state laws of any kind... tax... labor...
> whatever.  Least of all me.  But there's a material difference between
> actually being a state attorney general, and doing, or not doing, what
> that job demands and, in contrast, doing what ARIN does, i.e. routinely
> handing out millions of dollars worth of commercially valuable concessions
> to entities that, if you were not deliberately turning a blind eye, could
> be seen to be self-evident tax cheats.  (Checking this is free and takes
> about five seconds, so the usual excuses of it being either too costly
> or too time consuming don't apply.)
>
> To be clear, it is my contention that what ARIN does... or rather, what it
> does not do... in the way of vetting is in no sense "normal", and it is
> arguably enabling tax fraud.  ARIN may not be driving the getaway car on
> these crimes, but I'm not sure that that the distinction is sufficiently
> large, in practice, to quibble about.
>
> So, the question is just this:  Why should ARIN be exempt from normal and
> ordinary vetting procedures that are routine and commonplace everywhere
> else?  If the Cincinnati Airport Authority can do it and does do it, and
> if the department within the State of California that awards the concession
> for the lemonaid stand in Yosemite Park can do it and does do it, then
> what makes ARIN so special that it has to NOT do it?  And wouldn't it be
> better, all around, if it did do this minimal checking?  Wouldn't it be
> better for both society as a whole and also for the ARIN membership if
> ARIN did not let the really really obvious tax cheats into the club in the
> first place?
>
> This isn't "policing".  It's just reasonable and minimal club roster hygiene.
>
> And based on this Micfo case, I think that the benefits should by now be
> apparent to all.
>
>
> Regards,
> rfg
>
>
> P.S.  For the benfit of anyone who thinks that I am just spouting pure
> hyperbole when I assert that ARIN could be viewed as being in some sense
> complicit with tax fraud, if anyone asks I'll be happy to try to get my
> old friend Suresh in here.  Then I'll let him tell the story... and provide
> the links for... the time when law enforcement descended on RIPE headquarters
> in Europe, fully prepared, apparently, to arrest someone for RIPE's apparent
> role in money laundering.  Fortunately, it did not actually come to that, in
> the end, but the story, which is 100% true, may perhaps illuminate the fact
> that I may not be totally alone in attributing some level of culpability to
> these RIRs which think themselves too good or too special to fully check
> the bona fides of the various people and entities that they allow into their
> respective clubrooms.
>
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