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Comment by inuhj | Hacker News Reader

I'm having this same discussion with my tax attorney and CPA firms. Right now my corporate structure is all LLC's with plans to elect to be treated as a C Corp for taxation. For smaller companies there are a lot of headaches involved in keeping the documentation for a C Corp. Whether you held all your board meetings becomes important if you get sued and they try to pierce the corprate veil.

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There's less documentation for a C corp than there is for an LLC. Literally all you need is a Statement of Information (usually 1 page of basic info, like name and address) and Articles of Incorporation (also 1 page, though they can be longer as required by the needs of the business).

LLCs also require the equivalent of board meetings (aka, member meetings) to avoid veil-piercing, and indeed for veil-piercing purposes have all the same requirements as corporations. (I wrote a law review article on veil-piercing for LLCs, so I'm very familiar with how it works).

S-corps are the easiest, but you'll be more restricted in capital structure. Still, it's sufficient for many more people than realize it.

*> headaches involved in keeping the documentation for a C corp

Are there SaaS providers to streamline the compliance process?

Stripe is trying to help:

https://stripe.com/atlas

I contacted them about using their services for my existing Delaware C Corp that I originally registered using incorporate.com . They told me that the company must be opened through them for them to manage it later.

But be careful to read through their list of prohibited businesses. I know a fair number of people who got the boot for doing IT support because tech support scams have made Stripe classify that as high risk.

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