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Ask Slashdot: How To Collect Payments From a Multinational Company?
An anonymous reader writes "I run a small dev shop focused on web development, based in Europe. For the past six years we've had lots of successful projects with clients from CEE, Western Europe and the U.S. One of our main clients was based in the U.S. We started working for them in 2008, while they were a 'promising start-up' and everything went smoothly until they were bought by a multinational corp. We couldn't be happier to work for such a big player in the market, andwe even managed to get by with huge payment delays (3-4 months on a monthly contract), but now, after more than two years working for them, I have the feeling we're getting left out. We have six-month-old unpaid invoices and we're getting bounced between the E.U. and U.S. departments every time we try to talk to them. What can a small company do to fight a big corporation that's NASDAQ listed and has an army of lawyers? They've been getting a lot of bad press lately so I don't think that will scare them either."
I dealt with this, myself. I worked as a hired gun for a very large TV marketing company in the US that decided they didn't want to pay me for my work as a developer. I regular ol' lawyer got me paid in a matter of hours (minus his cut, of course) by contacting their legal department. They were clearly wrong, and didn't want to spend more than a few minutes' of their legal time looking into it, so I was paid the same day my attorney first contacted them. It was for an amount in the low 5-figures.
Of course, I didn't want to have to pay an attorney every time I wanted to get paid for a job, so I quit working with those kinds of companies.
I don't respond to AC's.
No, stay professional. If they're not actively contesting the invoices, just neglecting to pay them, get a debt collection agency (no-cure no-ay if necessary) and send them after them. They may get your money for you, and if not, they may sue them for you.
In any case, don't get advice from random people online, get advice from lawyers and debt collectors who know about this sort of thing. Who know the relevant laws in your and their country, who know relevant treaties, etc.
But surely if you're a dev shop that has existed for more than a year, you already knew this.