Senate State, Veterans, & Military Affairs

Filings are handled by the Colorado Secretary of State. And it adds new tools and procedures to address fraudulent or unauthorized business filings. So fraudsters have been using bad forms of payments to file records without actually paying for the filing. With this Bill 1088, the Secretary of State can void or remove a business filing in the state database based if the electronic payment for that filing doesn't go through. So for example, if the payment is reversed or fails, this prevents not just the harm from a fraudulent filing, but for the lack of payment as well. One person has had, in, you know, in the case studies, one person has had more than 15,000 fraudulent business filings right now, a complaint against one of these filings doesn't necessarily impact any other problematic filings. And this bill lets the Secretary of State mark a business record as unauthorized or fraudulent based on a notice from the Attorney General. So for any additional fraudulent business businesses related to the original notice, the Secretary of State would now be able to directly manage any other filings related to that company without first referring the complaint back to the Attorney General.…