[arin-ppml] Of interest?

[Owen DeLong]

I believe ARIN will accept a copy of a legitimate business tax certificate from your
municipality in lieu of evidence of incorporation.

There are other documents they will accept as well. I’ve never had a problem registering
multiple non-incorporated organizations over the years.

Owen


> On May 18, 2019, at 8:02 PM, Paul McNary <pmcnary at cameron.net> wrote:
> 
> 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.
>> 
>> _______________________________________________
>> ARIN-PPML
>> You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to
>> the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List (ARIN-PPML at arin.net).
>> Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at:
>> https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml
>> Please contact info at arin.net if you experience any issues.
>> 
>> 
> _______________________________________________
> ARIN-PPML
> You are receiving this message because you are subscribed to
> the ARIN Public Policy Mailing List (ARIN-PPML at arin.net).
> Unsubscribe or manage your mailing list subscription at:
> https://lists.arin.net/mailman/listinfo/arin-ppml
> Please contact info at arin.net if you experience any issues.