Secretary of State Jena Griswold blew $8.4 million of your tax dollars on a PR stunt resulting in thousands of bogus new business filings that muddied the waters of business-friendly rankings Colorado didn’t earn.
PeakNation™ will recall the business fee holiday Griswold declared in July 2022, which ran out of money in May, lowering $50 fees for new limited liability companies (LLC) to just one dollar.
Fraud ensued including one man who registered 15,000 businesses to an address in Northglenn, and then resold them at a profit until he was busted by the state’s attorney general.
The Denver Post writes in an exhaustive new report that “more than 160,000 LLCs formed, but thousands were likely fraudulent.”
Buried deep down in the article, we learn that Griswold is not going to scrub the fraudulent filings, but instead plans to note the fake business numbers with a simple asterisk in future business data.
Now that’s how you Colorado!
The article reveals that during the fee holiday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce ranked Colorado 5th nationwide in new business filings per capita, while WalletHub had us 7th in best places to start a new business.
We’re guessing Griswold won’t ask for a correction to reflect the fraudulent numbers that led to those business-friendly rankings.
Meanwhile, rankings that didn’t rely so heavily on LLC registration numbers had Colorado rankings in 16th place.
The Denver Post says the result is a distorted picture of the state’s entrepreneurial activity.
Overall, the super shady holiday fee scheme brought in about 160,000 new filings before the plan went broke.
From the Post:
More than a year on from the fee relief, business registration delinquencies are rising sharply, indicating some filers’ level of commitment didn’t extend beyond submitting paperwork.
That has raised concerns about the reliability of business registration numbers and whether the job gains and economic activity expected to follow on the heels of so many business starts will materialize.
Read the whole article here.
It’s the perfect example of the defective job performance we’ve come to expect of Griswold as secretary of state.