Chimney Roommates

Incorporating a Business: Ultimate FAIL

We faced traffic, sleet, and snow on our drive from D.C. to a post office near the DE border with the intention of opening a post office box for our company. We expected our drive to be slowed down by big rigs and construction, but we did not expect to find ourselves tailgating a horse and buggy going 20mph down a no-passing two-lane farm road. Welcome to rural Delaware.

Our thought was that once we walked into a post office with two valid forms of ID each, we would walk out with the keys to a P.O. box. Upon arriving at our destination, we learned about a mandatory weeklong P.O. box approval process. The logic that a person’s identity is reliably verified by confirming (via fax…) our home addresses according to our hometown post offices escapes me. But alas, there’s no arguing with the U.S. postal system.

There was nothing more we could do but drive back to D.C. and wait.

As expected of the U.S. postal system, we never received a call back from our post office friends in DE to tell us whether we were approved for a box. At the end of the week I called to inquire about the status of our application and learned that neither of our two hometown post offices had replied to our identity verification request. Thankfully some hand waving happened and I was told to come in the next day to receive our P.O. box key. Hooray!

After another long drive, this time solo and in blindingly heavy rain, I arrived in DE to pay the one-year fee for a P.O. box — cobwebs included.

Lesson Learned: Didn’t Need Road Trips After All

With the P.O. box key in hand, our next obstacle was to find out how to receive mail from our box without always traveling to DE to do personal pickups. We needed a third-party solution since the U.S. postal service does not offer mail forwarding for P.O. boxes.

On the drive back to D.C., I happened to pass by the office of an incorporation services company and inquired about any P.O. box mail forwarding solutions they might offer for businesses.

That office taught me two very important facts:

First, it is illegal to hire someone to pick up mail from someone else’s P.O. box.

Second, having a P.O. box in Delaware would NOT help us incorporate a business in Delaware.

Go figure!

How to (Correctly) Incorporate a Business in Delaware

The representative at the incorporation services company also taught me about the paperwork needed to incorporate a business in Delaware, which can be found online here. This handy form asks for the address of a registered agent in Delaware. A registered agent must have a street address in Delaware. A P.O. box is not a street address. Additionally, the agent we spoke to offered business mail forwarding at a yearly rate that was less than what it would cost to maintain a Delaware P.O. box.

Most importantly, the agent told me that her office frequently incorporates businesses in Delaware without requiring the business owners to physically travel to Delaware. At this point I did three things.

First, I apologized to my weather-beaten vehicle for unnecessarily bringing it approximately 400 miles closer to its final mileage. Second, I tried to block out of my mind all the productive things I could have been doing in the hours lost to unnecessary driving. Third, I drove back to the post office to try to cancel our brand new P.O. box ownership.

The final fact I learned on this journey is that once a P.O. box is opened, it is impossible to return it for a full refund regardless of how long it has been opened, and in our case, for less than two hours.

TL;DR: If you want to incorporate a business in Delaware, do not open a P.O. box in DE. Instead, hire a registered incorporation agent.