Yes, I noted in the post the BBB does not actively mediate a contractor case of non-payment unless it is a case of false advertising. Based on Cirrus advertising, you can make a case for misrepresentation.
BBB will always accept a formal complaint and any documentation which goes to trustworthiness, reliability, and meeting contractual obligation even when they do not actively mediate. According to BBB, regardless of your contractor or consumer status, a substantiated complaint of non-payment of contractual obligation does affect BBB's rating of the non-payor company.
You asked about the logs. The shop logs are filled with positive feedback and grades 10, 9, and one or two 8s. All approved. All accepted and all verified. The only thing they excluded was a case where the leasing office did not answer calls for one week and two or three calls over the business week to the community yielded no response. The exclusion resulted in wasted call time, but not a tremendous loss. It appears their thinking is if you do your job, but the paid leasing office does not, you should be accountable for the non-performance of the leasing office and go unpaid for the evaluation. It is not uncommon, in my experience, for Cirrus to hide leasing office non-performance with an exclusion of the contractor's work. In other words, they ask you to evaluate on the basis of KPIs, and informed consent of the leasing office who knows they are being evaluated, but if the leasing office doesn't hit its KPIs, Cirrus hides poor performers. They do not submit the review. Only glowing reports make it to the client although the client pays for objective evaluation of performance on agreed upon KPIs. It may be only 1 in 10 are non-performing, but the client never sees the 10%.
We were told leasing office staff are paid $300 to participate in the KPI/TQM-like performance reviews. You would think they would be aware of their KPI's and be motivated. Apparently when leasing office motivation is lacking, Cirrus fails to include the data.
To your question on the alleged Cirrus bankrupty, I have not seen any public record confirming it. Nothing to confirm in California, but they operate interstate, and I have not devoted any more time to checking all 50 United States.
We agreed to net 90 days. When they failed to pay in 90 days, we offered a payment arrangement and encouraged them to return a modified agreement if unable to meet their obligations.They did not respond to the offer.
We did not make any credit bureau reports for six months after the agreed date for payments, and provided months of fair notice to cure the non-payment by communicating with us if they needed to modify the contract and make installments. They assured us they would send payment. They didn't. It has been more than one year since the original invoices were forwarded to them.
Regarding your question about the payment address, I confirmed the payment address with them by email on the active account, and by certified mail with return receipt on the account they asked us to re-register and which I deactivated. The correspondence was tracked and delivered by USPS. No question they received it. In case they were unable to afford return postage, I sent them a return envelope postage pre-paid. No response. Not a word.
Although the logs indicate received and accepted status with positive feedback, their story about payment when contacted by phone and email was ever-changing.
Since 2015 they claimed Cirrus only pays to a 1099 business registration. They initially asked for a change from personal to business lest the IRS should rule they are employers and labor law should require of them full provision of retirement benefits, health insurance, living wage of $15 USD per hour inclusive of prep time, travel, onsite and reporting time, overtime, etc.
Cirrus publishes its requirement of a 1099 contractor registration on their website with a contractual agreement to 1099 status included in the registration. Presumably they chose the provisions under 1099 because they exempt Cirrus from fair labor practices. 1099 provisions also exempt them from witholding of income for tax purposes and reporting 1099 income under the threshold of $600 annually. It gives them a paperwork break. They requested it. That is what was registered.
Later in 2018, the story was they didn't pay because they only pay to a personal registration, not a business name or registered DBA, not an EIN. The request from Valeria Valencia some three years into a 1099 relationship under contract was to re-register with your personal name and SSN.
We re-registered. Cirrus website still says they will only accept and pay 1099 contractors,' so no changes there. Nothing indicates a policy change or update. As of 2020, they have paid neither to the business, nor the personal registration.
Bait and switch? Phishing? Identity theft? We don't know. Possibly. But certainly it meets the criteria for false advertising if they cite as the reason for non-payment a 1099 status their published documents and explicitly require.
After one or two months of activity on the adamantly demanded personal registration, the story was, we have two registrations and you can not have two.
We deactivated the first, and notified them by phone and certified mail, but I have a hard time believing anyone could count two registrations when they were initiated by their own demand for a re-registration which departed from published requirements for 1099 EIN to personal registration with a SSN.
All the insistence on SSN and personal name after publishing the 1099 business requirement sounds like phishing to me and if you read your state DAs webpages, it apparently sounds like phishing to him, too. The transition to 1099 EIN has been industry-wide in the US. MSPA North America recommends it. MSCs contracts state the 1099 status, which is exclusively a business registration, defines the nature of the relationship. The upshot is EIN or SSN and personal name or DBA usage is strictly up to the contractor on MSC sites. IRS records, which are non-public and perhaps a little more secure, record ownership of the EIN and only there is the personal name and SSN linked to the EIN which is as it should be. You don't want personal names and SSNs going to hundreds of MSCs seen by potentially thousands of anonymous persons. It may be self-evident to those with experience in the industry a 1099 contractor is entitled to use his or her DBA and EIN. The gestalt has not reached invoice processing at Cirrus. That is the legal protection they were trying to breach, to force a properly registered business to use a personal name and SSN. Un-American.
Beyond security issues, many business owners segregate income, activities, or general programming using their DBA and EIN. It is incorrect and unecessarily invasive to attempt to extract a personal SSN from those who elect to use their EIN. Nonprofits often have a unique EIN for each program in their scope of work. They want the 1099 to report to that EIN, not to the SSNs of their volunteers, employees, or officers and directors. It would be ridiculous for income to be reported to an individual when it is an incorporated business or non-profit program and not a sole proprietership. If Cirrus does not know that, they are responsible for knowing.
You commented on Cirrus's unresponsiveness and I should clarify. It was Monnie Howard who was unresponsive to calls or email. I recorded the non-answer and the run-around, with whoever the Valeria Valencia person was, and conversations with the account manager, someone identifying herself as Debbie Depew.
Valeria Valencia sent an email after receiving the group email, and after the call with Debbie Depew, stating payment was pending. The email confirming invoices were verified arrived after months of correspondence.
To date, the person who identifies herself as Valeria Valencia states she will not process a 1099 payment to a DBA and EIN. As a courtesy, I provided full citation of the published 1099 requirement directly from the Cirrus website and copied all parties, Valeria Valencia who identified herself as the payment processor, Debbie Depew, who stated she was the property evaluation account manager, and Monnie Howard who they identified as the owner of Cirrus and the responsible payor.
Valeria acknowledges in recorded conversations that she did receive the information forwarded to her regarding the 1099 registration Cirrus requires. She continued after being informed of the 1099 requirement which allows DBA and EIN registration to deny payment stating she knows nothing about business contracting. She stated she just processed invoices and Monnie Howard was responsible for transmitting payment. I asked for confirmation of the source of her information. If there is a real Monnie Howard, she did not answer her phone at any time during business hours on any day of the week, and never returned voice mail or email messages.
Ultimately, after the calls, emails, and Valeria Valencia's confirming the invoices had finallybeen verified and payment was pending, Cirrus still failed to remit. The unanswered phone line purportedly belonging to Monnie Howard does not go to anyone who answers calls or email or transmits payment of their obligations.
You commented on small claims. The small claims case is black and white, open and shut. Cirrus received the work. They accepted it with positive feedback. They were in possession of the business registration requested under Cirrus's published requirements. They received a re-registration as they requested, yet failed to pay for the services they acknowledge were received and approved.
Since Cirrus is interstate, I believe any injured party may file small claims in their home state. For routers, I believe filing is accepted wherever the work was solicited by Cirrus and carried out by the contractor. Injured parties can receive the judgment locally which may then be filed in neighboring states. I do not believe it is necessary to travel to California. You can e-file your judgments under reciprocity in California. There is full faith and credit in most of the 50 states. There has been movement toward uniformity. Checking with a local clerk or your local counsel is always a good idea if pursuing small claims, but they can be done Pro Se. They are simple enough. You won't have a fool for a client.
My reports to credit bureaus are inclusive of non-payment by Cirrus. As long as they remain in the record, there is some chance of recovery, or at least some accountability that may help to protect the public, but there is a caveat. All of these remedies and petitions for relief of injured parties may not make a difference if there is criminal intent. The DA will determine that since we do not claim to be able to examine the parties for criminal intent, but I wouldn't want to give anyone false hope. If you are dealing with criminality, there may be no recovery in that case. The parties may be in jail, or unwilling to honor their obligations as those possessed of criminal intent often are. Realistically, legal action can not be expected to make dishonorable people honorable. It can only effect justice in the form of a judgment that may or may not be paid, and by generating a record that may offer protection of the public from repeated harm by those who intend to repeat the injurious pattern of behavior.
The best protection against a disreputable company is to halt any further work for them and not take contracts with them at all.
This company has earned a bad reputation, and no amount of fair-pay advertising bait is really worth the risk of potential losses to the contractor which include significant time, expense, and earned income.
There are many who have received the warnings about this company here in the forum, and have taken the Cirrus contract, only to post later they were not paid, or the evaluation was not as represented (it was four hours, not two). Those who warned of possible difficulties did not wish to be vindicated and I think were rather sorry to see they were.
Cirrus makes use of a fair-wage advertisment, apartment evaluations for $50, $100, random evaluations with no targeted evaluations dragging on for weeks, or retail evalutions for $75 or $150.
More than a few victim statements contain explanations of Cirrus's appeal to those who are fledgling businesses just starting out, having little or no capital, little to no reserves, and who are struggling to meet cost of living. Cirrus is appealing to those who are seeking fair pay when web-based companies on the whole are not offering it. But if you factor the probability of zero payment, or significantly delayed payment, into the business pro forma and cash flow, you can see it for what it is. It is not a fair-wage proposition. It is loss waiting to happen. Most business owners don't like to play a game of financial Russian Roulette.
It is reminiscent of the story of the snake who promises not to bite and begs for passersby to undertake a rescue, then viciously injects a lethal venom into the poor victim, and slithers away uttering in classic unconscionable snake fashion words of condemnation to the blameless victim, 'You knew what I was when you picked me up.' The moral lesson is the same. Don't be tempted to take on a potential liability or an outright malignancy based on false advertising of character or nature. Cirrus falsely advertises its good rating, its good character, its reliable payment record. It does not have good character if it habitually fails to meet its contractual obligations.
The key to success is to find reliable, trustworthy, scrupulous companies with whom you can have a good working relationship. This may not be one of them, but they are out there. Some good advice for those just starting out is never take a contract that would damage you if the other party does not perform. Build as much certainty as you can into your work. Start small. Don't take out-of-pocket purchase requests unless you can afford the loss associated with potential non-payment for your services and until you know the company. Don't generate travel expenses if you can avoid it until you know the company. Stay as close to home as you can. Branch out after you determine which companies have established a record of being reliable.