Articles Posted in Limited Liability Companies

[March 3, 2018. The General Assembly amended some of the provisions created the Business Entity Harmonization Bill, as discussed in a Postscript to this series.]

This is the last in four-part series. The first three parts are here: here, here, and here.

This Part IV describes some flaws of Senate Enrolled Act 443 that we ran across while writing the first three parts.  We hope the General Assembly will address them, either in the 2018 session or another.

[March 3, 2018. The General Assembly amended some of the provisions created the Business Entity Harmonization Bill, as discussed in a Postscript to this series.]

This is the third of a four-part series discussing the Business Entity Harmonization Bill passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 2017. The first two parts are here and here.

Senate Enrolled Act 443 creates, effective as of January 1, 2018, a new Article 0.6, the Uniform Business Organization Transactions Code, in Title 23 of the Indiana Code. In previous versions of the statute, provisions dealing with mergers, conversions, and domestications of business corporations, limited liability companies (LLCs), limited partnerships (LPs), limited liability partnerships (LLPs), and nonprofit corporations were scattered across several articles of Title 23. The Uniform Business Organization Transactions Code gathers most of them into one article that, in general, applies at least as broadly as each corresponding provision of the former statute, and in some cases more broadly. In addition, the new article provides for the acquisition of ownership interest (i.e., stock in a corporation or interest in a partnership or LLC) by another entity.

[March 3, 2018. The General Assembly amended some of the provisions created the Business Entity Harmonization Bill, as discussed in a Postscript to this series.]

This is the second of a four-part series discussing the Business Entity Harmonization Bill passed by the Indiana General Assembly in 2017. An overview of the bill is provided in Part I.

Senate Enrolled Act 443 creates, effective as of January 1, 2018, a new Article 0.5 in Title 23 of the Indiana Code, the Uniform Business Organizations Code, that includes a number of provisions that apply to Indiana business corporations (including professional corporations and benefit corporations, but excluding insurance companies), limited liability companies (LLCs, including series LLCs), limited partnerships (LPs), limited liability partnerships (LLPs), and nonprofit corporations, eliminating a number of inconsistencies between similar provisions for different types of entities. The following discussion is a brief description of some of the more important provisions, drawing attention to new or substantially changed provisions.

[March 3, 2018. The General Assembly amended some of the provisions created the Business Entity Harmonization Bill, as discussed in a Postscript to this series.]

Indiana law provides for several types of business and nonprofit entities, each of which is governed by one or more articles of Title 23 of the Indiana Code, all of which require similar filings with the Indiana Secretary of State, and all of which are capable of undergoing transactions such as mergers and conversions into other types of entities. The types of entities and the governing portions of Title 23 are:

Part I of this two-part series addressed requirements for maintaining an Indiana limited liability company, including the preservation of the corporate veil, that are imposed by statute or that may be imposed through the LLC’s operating agreement.  Part II addresses recommended practices for maintaining Indiana LLCs that will help preserve the corporate veil (the liability shield that protects the assets of owners, or the assets of other related entities, from the LLC’s creditors) and are simply good business practices.  Although the failure to follow one or more of the following recommendations will not necessary subject your LLC to veil-piercing, the following characteristics and practices are common to most well operated and maintained LLCs.

  • Do not use the LLC for fraudulent or other improper purposes. Courts have very little patience with the owners of LLCs, corporations, or other limited liability forms of businesses who use them to perpetuate a fraud or to improperly hide assets from creditors, for example by transferring assets from one company to another in an attempt to hide or protect the assets from creditors of the first company. That is not to say that LLCs cannot be properly used for asset protection purposes under the correct circumstances, but once an LLC has incurred liability, transferring assets to another company or to the owners, especially if the LLC does not receive fair market value in exchange for the assets, will likely result in the company’s veil being pierced to enable its creditors to reach at least the transferred assets and perhaps the other assets of the recipient.
  • Keep the LLC’s assets separate from the owner’s assets or the assets of other entities. Open bank accounts for the LLC that are separate from the owners’ accounts or accounts of related businesses. Deposit all of the LLC’s income into those accounts (not directly into the owners’); pay all of the LLC’s obligations from its own accounts; and pay none of the owners’ obligations or obligations of a related company from the LLC’s accounts. Generally, the LLC’s assets should be used only for purposes of the LLC’s business and not for the personal use of the owners. Do not pay yourself by writing checks from the LLC bank account to pay your personal obligations; pay yourself by writing a check from the business account, deposit it in your personal account, and then pay your personal obligations from your personal account.

Compared with corporations, limited liability companies are generally low maintenance, but not entirely maintenance free. A few requirements are imposed by statute, and the operating agreement may or may not create some additional formalities that must be observed. In addition, there are good practices that, in addition to observing the required formalities, help preserve the liability shield that protects the owners’ assets from creditors of the LLCs (or the “corporate veil”). Part I addresses the statutory requirements and the types of requirements that are sometimes found in operating agreements; Part II will address some best practices.

NOTE:  This post and Part II address only the requirements and best practices related to “corporate” governance, particularly those that are relevant to preserving the corporate veil.  For any particular LLC, there may be a myriad of other legal requirements and best practices related to other areas, such as employer-employee relationships and permits or licenses that are necessary to conduct the LLC’s business, that are not addressed here.

Statutory Formalities

I’ve written before about the need for the owners of small businesses to have at least three professionals:  a business lawyer, a tax accountant, and an insurance broker. Because it has been a while, and because the advice is so important, I decided to write about it again. Thinking about a group of three professionals led me to consider analogies to other groups of three people.

The first thing that came to mind was the traditional English nursery rhyme:

Rub a dub dub,

If you are not already familiar with series LLCs or with the new Indiana series LLC statute that takes effect on January 1, 2017, you may want to read the articles at Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, and Part V.

In the first of these articles, I compared a series LLC to a parent LLC with subsidiary LLCs, and I stated that one difference between the two concepts is that a master LLC does not own its series in the same sense that a parent company owns its subsidiaries. Instead, the interest that makes up each series is held by persons who may or may not also hold interest in the master LLC or in other series. Although I believe that is commonly the way series LLCs are set up, I think it may be possible to set up a series LLC so that the master LLC does, in fact, hold part or all of the interest in its series. Let’s look at four possible structures, using the example of a real estate developer than develops and owns three apartment buildings.

Structure #1

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