State to Open Corporate Registration Office in S.D.

California Secretary of State March Fong Eu on Thursday announced that her office will set up a branch in San Diego next year. The office will make it easier for San Diego businesses to file incorporation papers--and cut the application time drastically.

Currently, the process of incorporation, which requires an application and a check of the proposed corporate name, takes about 10 days, Eu said. After the September opening, that process will be reduced to hours.

Eu also said that about 10,000 of the 500,000 or so requests for corporate information received by the Sacramento corporate filing division come from San Diego. There are two other branch offices, in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Concurrent with the plans for a San Diego branch, Eu intends to automate the corporate filings division. That $1.3-million project should make on-the-spot checks into the backgrounds of the more than one million corporations that do business in California much easier, Eu said.

The state keeps information on the status of a corporation, the date it was incorporated and the names and addresses of the corporation’s officers.

Next year’s automation “will mean the end of the labor-intensive and inefficient manual index card system,” Eu said.

Attorney Michael Bergner, who specializes in corporation and partnership law, said that the system being used in Sacramento “is inefficient at this time.” He cited instances in which he or his secretary would call the Sacramento office to obtain corporate information, but instead of receiving assistance “the phone just rings and rings and rings.”

Bergner said that automation is needed because “you should not have to wait for hours to get through.”

Also Thursday, Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.) announced that a full district office of the U.S. Commerce Department will be established in San Diego within two months.

“After years of making our case that San Diego is an export center in its own right, we have finally convinced the Commerce Department that a one-man satellite office was completely inadequate,” Wilson said.

The new district office will have five employees.

The Commerce Department office will help local businesses find and develop export markets, as well as understand and comply with export laws.