Following the recommendation of state auditors, Secretary of State Denise Merrill’s office may ask the legislature to allow it to legally dissolve companies that have missed annual registration deadlines.
An audit of the secretary’s office released today said that its database of 401,528 businesses subject to annual filing requirements contains a number of companies that are well overdue. Two samplings of 30 companies found that 39 were not in compliance. The groups were seven years and four years overdue on average, respectively.
Merrill’s office responded in the audit that many of those businesses are gone and the state doesn’t know how to contact them.
But auditors noted that the state could be losing out on some fee revenue too. Annual report filing fees range from $20 to $435. The fees amounted to nearly $26 million in fiscal year 2012, according to the audit.
The secretary’s office used to have the authority to legally dissolve business entities that had not been filing the reports, but the legislature took that power away in 1994. Merrill said her office has made filing easier, required email address contacts from filers and attempted to educate filers about the requirement.
