Countersignature Plan of Dissolution Made Easy

Countersignature plan of dissolution

Hi. Lee Phillips here. I want to talk to you two seconds about how you terminate a company and I'm going to take a very narrow view of this. A lot of people have companies they're talked into them at the seminars they start them up, they run the business for two seconds it doesn't work they don't owe anybody money but they've got this little company, this corporation, this LLC, partnership, whatever it is and it just sits there. Another YouTube video we talk about the liabilities of having it just sit there and there are liabilities so we've made a decision we're going to shut it down we don't have any creditors we don't owe anybody money. How do you shut it down? now if you owe people money and you're going bankrupt and all this and that and the other that's a whole different deal I will give you that but there are lots of people have the small company don't owe anybody money they may have a little money in the bank account take it out of the bank account, close the bank account and then let's shut the company down. You do it two ways. You do it the informal way which means you just don't pay any more money no state fees, no nothing. When you don't pay the state fee on time, guess what? The state says that you are a bad boy. You're "not in good standing" is the way they term it and your company goes into default it goes defunct by definition and it just kind of sits there out in limbo. State keeps it but it isn't active It's no good. The other way you do it is you formally shut it down and each state has a procedure you can go on most states' websites maybe not California but most states' websites and you can get a form for dissolution of a company and they're going to have you fill out the form it's going to ask you a bunch of accounting questions how much money did you owe everybody and they want to make sure you're not screwing your creditors you fill that out you send it into the state some states require fees, some states don't. You pay your fifty bucks or whatever it is and the state will officially terminate this company. It's dead as far as the state's concerned. Okay we've taken care of the legal aspect of it. What else do we have to do? Well there may be a tax aspect to it. if you've gotten a tax ID number, EIN whatever you want to call it for your company then we need to make sure that the IRS knows that this company has died and that they're not going to be expecting any more tax returns from you. If you haven't been filing tax returns for your corporation, either an S corp or C corporate taxation structure, now that could be an LLC taxed under Subchapter S or taxed under Chapter C if you haven't been filing your tax returns and stuff you're going to need some professional help. Call the tax guys in my office if nothing else because you're in trouble. We'll assume you're not in trouble. You've been filing your tax returns you haven't done any business so you've just been writing zeros all the way down the return That's okay. You're going to file a final tax return and you don't have to wait till the end of the year you can do it today you file a final tax return for the company and on the front page of the tax return there's a little box and it says "Is this the final return?" and you check the little box. And the IRS will kill that EIN, that tax ID number for your company, they won't issue it to another company. It's dead. So we've now killed it with the state, we've now killed it with the IRS we don't have any bank accounts we don't have anything going. Your company's dead. Congratulations you killed your company and you want to kill your company do not have these dormant little companies hanging around because of the liabilities if no other reason and just the pain, the hassle of having this company just get rid of it. that's how you kill them. This is Lee Phillips talking about how to dissolve a small company.