Out of utter shock I need to write about my experiences dealing with the city of San Francisco over a simple business license. You would figure any city that wishes for growth would do anything in their power to make this process as simple as possible. San Francisco on the other hand is simple to deal with, IF you wish to create a tax ID under your own name.
If you wish to take your normal business and turn it into a business name, which does not include your surname, then you need to do the following. Enter the fictitious business name department; this department also handles wedding certificates as well. Bring them the form for your new business name, as long as it is not conflicting with a current CA business. They will make you go to the business license office on the other side of the building. After you wait in line, they will look up your account and make sure that your taxes as up to date. Which in most cases are not, since the tax code is so convoluted it is nearly impossible to stay on top of. They will send you to the tax desk, which will inform you that you need to pay a tax that you most likely have never hear of or you do not understand.
At this point, they will send you to the tax desk, near the business license desk for payment. Oh, they only take cash or check, wow for such a sophisticated city; they cannot take a credit card. After this, they will send you back to the tax collector desk to confirm payment. This person will say all is good and you should go directly to the desk that creates the fictitious business name. This desk will force you to wait for a ridicules amount of time just to tell you that they need a certification from the business license desk. So you go back and wait in line for them to provide this form, which takes at least another half hour to complete.
Now that you have this silly form, you must go back to the fictitious naming department and try to file once again! Another 40-50 minutes go by and you are up again. You are asked to pay a fee and publish the new business within an authorized publication. This publication must file a form to the city within 30 days to ensure that it was actually posted to the public. Instead of the city providing you just a simple list, they become creative and sell your information to ALL of the publications in the bay area.
You are now subject to a bombardment from these publishers of ads and offers, to post your new business name. For as little as $20 to well over $100 for the exact same offer. Many of these publishers have automated this process and offer a way to complete the requirements online. However, when I attempted to access these sites, they where ALL down!
After missing the deadline, I was forced by a publisher to go back to city hall and re-publish the exact same form and pay the BS tax that I have already paid. Of course you must stand in line and fill out all of the same documentation out once again.
For such a so-called “green” city, there sure is a ton of paperwork that should have been automated years ago. Thus the corpus of my bitching comes to fold, why is it a city of such great power and progressiveness cannot streamline their processes? It seems to me that they are just trying to keep jobs for the sake of “not offending anyone” for their lack of skills. Why not have one desk that handles all of the business issues? Oh well, I will never get the 10+ hours that I have wasted back.