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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."
Send them an invoice with the maximum late payment penalty that the law AT BOTH SIDES allows, with a giant red statement that they're half a year late, and send it it to the person responsible, with a clear explanation of how much each increased payment delay costs.
If they delay you even one month beyond that, send a new invoice with the expected increase, and cc: it with a copy of all the others you've sent to the person responsible, their manager, accounts receivable, and the office of the president.
StoneCypher is Full of BS
have an attorney in the usa draft them a letter asking for a simple explanation along with a detailed sequence of events.
this will mean they will ask their own attorney to give a response.
their own attorney will tell them they better avoid legal issues over a startup purchase. how would google look if it didnt pay off youtube debt holders when buying the site?
File a lien against them, and make sure you inform Dun and Bradstreet of the lien.
I've been in IT at a major corp and had a supplier that I worked with personally come to me due to non-payment. I had to go pretty far up my chain of command before I found someone who would apply pressure to finance to pay up on the contract that they signed and approved. Had I not been there to facilitate it would have taken even longer, if they got paid at all. The supplier was international so they got a runaround. Wish I had a better answer, but finance depts sometimes like to collect interest on their bank accounts even at the expense of the company's reputation.
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.
For several years, I also ran a software business in Europe. When we started, our attorney had one bit of advice: never take a customer in the USA. We made exactly one exception, out of good will, and - sure enough, we regretted it.
If you are not based in the USA, it simply isn't worth the hassle and the risk. If they don't sue you (screw your contract, they'll sue you in a US court, which will claim jurisdiction using the long-arm doctrine), they'll screw you (as you are experiencing).
It doesn't help you in your situation, you're already there. However, for anyone else who may not yet have taken the plunge, don't. Ethics and law in the US reminds me of adventures in third world countries - it's just as dishonest and corrupt, only with prettier window dressing.
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Im not a huge supporter of unions, but Im not seeing why I would hate that idea. I think most people would agree that if a customer treats you like crap, dropping them is a really good way to solve the problem.
Maybe next time they send a work request to you just respond "would love to do the work, but my superiors say I cannot begin work until we get at least a partial payment for the past invoices". Thats how we handled it at my past job and it always worked pretty well, both at cutting off people who truly werent going to pay and at getting money from folks who were just a bit behind the curve.
Name and Shame violates US consumer protection laws, so it's a bad approach if you plan legal action in the US, or fear the same.
It's multinational? A better idea might be to sue a local branch of the company in your local court.
Please do not do this! First off contracts can be more complicated than they seem and if you make a wrong statement it can leave your company open to libel/slander charge. Second, it will mean that company will never work with you again. It will also look bad, even if your in the right, with new clients down the road.
Go hire a lawyer for a few hours and get them to write a notice of payment. Likely you are getting transferred between low-level temps in the accounts payable department who don't know what they're doing. A good lawyer can usually get the attention of someone important. Even if you have to take them to court it won't necessarily ruin your business relationship with the company (this stuff happens all the time) - but calling them out in public will.
Name and shame.
No, don't. Fortune 500 companies tend to be run by grown-ups, not Slashdot posters.
It's most likely a case of talking to the right person at the other company. Call them and ask who's in charge of your invoices, find out what's going on. Don't accept "we'll call you..." or "he's away this week...", ask to talk to the person's boss, go all the way up to the CEO if necessary.
Get a real suit to make the calls. Somebody who speaks the right language in the right tone of voice. Pay a lawyer with an extra-expensive suit to do it if necessary (scratch that, get a lawyer with an extra-expensive suit to do it, period. Show him your contract first).
Chances are, you'll get paid. A contract is a contract and big companies have shareholder reports where lawsuits for breach of them aren't popular items.
Step 2: If you don't have a contractual obligation then stop working for them. If they're not paying you and not telling you why then the romance is gone, somebody in their hierarchy doesn't like you for some reason. Stop working, call their main competitor and tell them what you were doing, they're probably interested.
No sig today...
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.
And make sure to charge interest on all past due invoices, at the highest legally possible rate.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Plus collection fees. If they don't pay within 3 more months, find out if you can put a lien on U.S. properties. After your final notice for payment, inform them that you have no alternative but fall back on legal remedies to collect your debt. Include the cost of legal representation required to collect on the debt. This may seem like small potatoes to the multinational, but I'm sure you can jack up the potato count substantially. More important you want to get in and out fast, these are flakes.
You don't even have to sue. We had a 6+ month invoice, we just had our lawyer write up a "final notice" letter letting them know that our lawyer was prepared to sue and we were paid that week.
Yep - put it all together. If you are in the UK, and they have a UK subsidiary, then you can apply to the High Court for a winding up order - you have to serve an order for payment (a "statutory demand") and have some proof that the payment is valid, and if they don't pay within 21 days, you close them down. Brilliant!
I had a friend who, back in the 90's, served such an order on Hewlett Packard's UK arm. Wow baby did it get their attention!! Because if they don't get it sorted, then they are declared insolvent by the High Court and then their accounts are frozen and administrators are called in. They can dispute it and restrain the petition - or they can pay up rather quickly, which in this case they did.
He figured he'd never get any more work from them - but at that point he didn't care because he wasn't getting paid.
Now for the real best answer. You have to do some of the stuff "Anonymous" was known to do, with out the rest of the stuff "Anonymous" has been known to do ie. ring around making it sound like you are in the know, to get the right contact information, in accounts payable.
Problem is you are at a massive distance to the people who decide who gets paid when. In large organisation getting to know the right people, chatting with them, sending Christmas and Birthday cards and presents. Might seem tright and old fashioned but, when you bills are at the smaller end of the scale, the people that sign off on the checks will remember you and you'll be surprised at how far up the payment schedule you can end up, do it right and less than thirty days is the norm. Make a pig out of yourself with lawyers and watch your contracts dry up.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
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.
Well, yeah. To be blunt, the only advice that should be taken on Slashdot for a question like this is from either people in a similar position who have actual experience of this having having happened to them and/or those few posters with an actual solid legal background. And the former's advice should be "this is how it went for me, blah blah, but you should get proper legal advice".
Too many Slashdotters will come up with "cute-on-paper" sounding ideas (e.g. the name-and-shame idea above) not based on practical experience without understanding the implications in the real world. I've said this many times before, but the problem with many Slashdotters is that they like to think they know how the legal system(s) work when they don't.
This is because they think the law can be deduced and works in a relatively logical manner, i.e. they (a) think they can deduce how a particular law might work logically because (b) they think that the way the law *should* work is the way that the law *does* work; i.e. that it's both fair and logical. But it's not always that way, and the only way to actually know how the law works is to have learned how the law works properly.
I've been attacked on more than one occasion for pointing this out, as if my drawing attention to the fact that this is how the (flawed) system works- like it or not- implies that I approve of it, i.e. shooting the messenger. But, yeah; any answers to this question should be taken as pointers from people who've encountered similar situations and what direction to be heading in, and certainly not taken as final legal advice or anything near it.
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