Pertinent Perils

A friend took this photograph at a Yankees baseball game showing the batter hitting the ball with such force that he broke the bat. It is a great photograph, the detail is perfect. And I thought it a great image for this blog posting describing what a friend and fellow small business owner had to do to get a large corporation to pay her (hint: it is one of the Wall Street banks that accepted government bailout money) an invoice that was more than two years past due. FINRA, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, oversees this particular company and, in the course of a routine audit, found that it had failed to properly disclose this past due debt on its books. After FINRA auditors surfaced this matter, the company paid my friend’s business the money that was well overdue. And FINRA imposed a fine on the company of five times the debt owed my friend. She told me that she has over $50,000 in receivables due her from large Wall Street firms for work that she has performed that she has been struggling for over two years to collect. Now she is informing all of them of the action FINRA took against this one company in the hope of motivating the others to pay. “I know I am destroying my relationships with these companies,” she told me, “but I need the money.” Actually, if she has to fight with them for over two years to get paid, these relationships are not worth preserving. Well done, FINRA.