Today’s blog revolves around an owner of a company that has a professional license. The company will have a professional license typically through the owner or what’s called a qualifier. Let’s take an example of an owner who has a license suspended or revoked. Please note that I’m not picking on general contractors; I’m just using that as an example. Let’s say a general contractor has a license suspended or revoked, he’s the qualifier for the company. Can that license for the general contractor be used as a qualifier for the company? No, it cannot. “Alright, we’ll get somebody else as a qualifier. I’ll still own the company and I’ll be an employee, or I’ll be still listed under the corporation as the CEO or whatever other title that I have.” NO, you can’t do that. [NC Licensing Board for General Contractors Laws and Regulations]
Under Under North Carolina General Statute 55B-13, “A licensing board may suspend or revoke a certificate of registration issued by it to a domestic or foreign professional corporation for any of the following reasons:
(1) Upon the failure of such corporation to promptly remove or discharge an officer, director, shareholder or employee who becomes disqualified by reason of the revocation or suspension of his license to practice; or
(2) Upon a finding by the licensing board that the professional corporation has failed to comply with the provisions of this Chapter or the regulations of the licensing board. So, if the individual who has a license that’s suspended or revoked is still listed as an officer or still employed and not removed in a timely manner, then that puts the business entity in jeopardy. Take a different example, for general contractors (GCs) again, say somebody else is the qualifier, but one of the GCs that’s working there has a license suspended, nothing happens, and the person is still allowed to keep working there. That puts the company at jeopardy under the North Carolina Professional Corporation Act that I mentioned. So, you got to be very careful. It’s very important to protect your license. It’s very important to protect your employee’s license in certain examples.
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