As COO of Prime Radiant, I am tasked with several bits of paperwork like making sure our taxes get filed and tending to our status as a corporation. One such task was registering as a Foreign Corporation in the state of Virginia. This is a step along the path of paying a salary to a remote employee working from there.

In the words of Colin:

You’d think you could say, “Hi, VA! We want to start throwing fistfulls of income tax at you. Is ok?”

and they’d be like, “Awesomez! Here iz tax id #. kthxbye!”

But no.

So, I created a checklist for all the steps needed for this process. Virginia, unfortunately, still uses a paper form. Some states (including Oregon, yay!) have web forms for this. But few states provide a checklist for all the information you need to successfully complete any particular form.

The registration process should be basically the same for other types of entities — Prime Radiant is a Delaware C Corporation with stock. And it should be similar in other US states, with the details about whether you can mail, fax or submit forms online varying.

The goal of all this was to be able to pay an employee working from Virginia a salary. There is a whole additional checklist for information you need to collect about employees and choosing a paycheck processor, and I’ll share all of that in another post.

Have you registered as a foreign corporation in another state? I’d love to know what was different about your process. Tell me at Checkmarkable or in the comments of this blog post!

Here’s the checklist for what I needed to register as a Foreign Corporation in Virginia: