I know I haven’t been following the weekly pattern for writing these but the last two weekends were a bit of a blur. I was able to enjoy the good weather and go out for long motorcycle rides out to the Olympic Peninsula. But I am glad to be sitting down and writing this today. Looking back at the past few weeks, a lot has happened.
License and Registration Please
No, not the one you are thinking of. It’s my business license and registration with the WA Department of Revenue (DOR). I had registered a sole-proprietorship initially but quickly realized that if I am going to do what I am doing full-time, I need to register an LLC. So I registered an LLC earlier this year. My sole proprietorship registration was coming up for renewal and I was going to let it lapse since I didn’t need it anymore and I wasn’t doing business under that ownership type anymore. Well, when I called the DOR they drew my attention to the Unified Business Identifier (UBI) that was printed on the certificate of formation they issued for my LLC. 🤦♂️ I had completely missed that. I scrambled to submit a registration for that with the DOR. Once I registered it I was then directed to file an excise tax return for the business for the last 8 months! I panicked to be honest. I was able to get them to waive the penalty on one of the returns but it seems they rejected my appeal on another one. Bummer!
I couldn’t help but think that the state could have just said: “hey, by the way, you’ll need to file an excise tax return for this newly formed LLC regardless of whether or not you have any business, so we went ahead and created the new DOR registration for you. Here you go. You’re welcome.”