Officers, Members or Managers, oh my! Today I offer advice on ‘multiple’ licensing. I can only offer a referral, rather than a solution for another inquiry, and suggest that sometimes a qualifier can have it, and take it with them when they go…
Q: I read in one of your articles that one of the conditions for a Qualifying party to qualify three licenses at the same time is for the majority of the personnel on the licenses to be the same. We have three companies within our organization that we want to license and utilize the same qualifying individual. All three companies are LLC’s with the same Holding Company as the sole Member. If we have the same Member for each of the three licensed entities, do we still need the Qualifier to be an officer? If so, does he need to be an officer of each of three licensed entities, or an officer of the Member?
A: If you want him to qualify all three, yes, he would need to be an officer of the three license holder entities, not just an officer of the Member. If it were only two licenses you were wanting him to qualify for, then he could an employee (RME). But since an RME/Employee is required to work a minimum of 32 hours a week, they don’t allow employees to qualify for 3 licenses because they know people aren’t working 96-hour weeks. Sometimes it just seems that long!
Q: Is it possible for an individual that holds a GC license via a Sole Proprietor to also hold a second GC license for an LLC or corporation?
A: Yes. If the individual wants both the sole owner license and the Company license (corp or LLC) active,then he/she would need to own at least 20% of the Company they are qualifying for. If there is no ownership interest in the company, then he/she would be required to inactivate their Sole Owner license.
Q: We need to obtain an Electrical license for a company we are creating. We have an agreement with an individual who will be our RME/RMO. We are in discussions as to whether we should form a corporation or a Limited Liability Company (LLC). Now we defer to you.
A: You should talk to a CPA about what type of entity to create. I can at least tell you from a licensing perspective, an LLC is required to have an additional bond that is not required of corporations so it’s a bit pricier to maintain an LLC license vs. Corporation. BUT perhaps the tax advantages outweigh the cost of the bond. So that’s where I step aside and defer to a CPA.
Q: You helped us earlier this year with putting our long time employee on our license as the qualifier with the exemption from testing. Am I correct that the license is only available to him so long as he works for our company? In other words, if he went to work somewhere else he will not have a personal license and therefore would need to sit for the exams?
A: He was granted a waiver of the exams based on the fact he’s worked for your licensed company for over five years in a Supervisory capacity. Now that he’s the RME, he’s considered “qualified”. So, the license still belongs to the Company, however he can use his qualification to obtain his own license, or go work for another company, without needing to sit for the exams.
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