compliance-rules

Status: draft / proposal. Not published, not part of the dataset yet.

Per-jurisdiction record of what happens when an LLC misses an annual obligation: the late fee (flat, percentage or interest), the grace period, and the cost of reinstatement after administrative dissolution, plus one short note on the process. One JSON file per jurisdiction in states/<slug>.json.

This namespace is additive: it adds no key to states.json, entitysearch-state-data, name-rules, dba-rules, processing-time or tax-rules, and nothing already published changes because of it. A consumer that ignores this directory sees exactly the dataset it saw before.

Why this namespace exists separately

Penalty structures are the most heterogeneous and least-copied facts in this domain: a state charges a flat fee, another a monthly percentage, a third adds interest, and several publish only the reinstatement path. They are scattered across fee schedules, penalty pages and statutes. This namespace reduces that chaos to one small set of fields per state — deliberately no penalty matrices, no interest tables, no per-year schedules — because the card a user needs asks three questions: how much for being late, how long do I have, and what does fixing it cost.

Scope boundaries

Annual obligations of an existing LLC only. Late fees, grace and reinstatement around annual reports and the standing annual obligations of a registered LLC. Formation-filing penalties are out of scope.
No penalty matrices. One late-fee shape per record: flat amount, or percentage/interest rate, or a published none. Where a state has several shapes, lateFeeBasis says so and the dominant figure goes in the field, with the rest in notes.
No interest tables or compounding schedules. A single monthly rate is data; a table is maintenance nobody will keep honest.
No court, judgment or criminal fees.
Tax-authority interest stays out unless it is the published late-fee shape for the annual obligation. Where the annual obligation is a tax (Delaware's annual tax, for example), the late fee on it belongs here; general income-tax interest does not.
This namespace is authoritative for the late fee, grace period and reinstatement fee. Any other mention of those values anywhere else in the dataset is prose, not a value to be read.

Sourcing

Held to the standard in the root README.md §Methodology. The publisher is the Secretary of State, the tax authority, or the statute that sets the penalty. No blogs, no formation-service pages, no commercial aggregators, including as corroboration.

Every admissible value is bound to a verbatim passage quoted from the cited page (evidence). null means not yet researched and is always preferred to a plausible guess. A published "no late fee" is a researched none, not an absent field.

Field dictionary

Identity

Field	Type	Notes
`stateName`, `stateAbbr`, `stateSlug`	string	Same conventions as the other namespaces; DC uses `district-of-columbia`

`compliance`

Field	Type	Notes
`lateFeeUsd`	number \| null	Flat late fee in USD; null when the state uses a rate or publishes none
`lateFeeRatePercentPerMonth`	number \| null	Monthly percentage or interest rate; the only rate field, by design
`lateFeeBasis`	enum \| null	`flat` · `percentage` · `interest` · `mixed` · `none` · `unpublished` — what the state actually publishes
`gracePeriodDays`	integer \| null	Published grace before the late fee applies; null when none is published
`reinstatementFeeUsd`	number \| null	The fee to reinstate after administrative dissolution, including any per-year component folded in; `reinstatementNote` says how
`reinstatementNote`	string \| null	One short sentence: what reinstatement requires (delinquent reports, per-year fees, time window)
`evidence`	evidence[]	One verbatim passage per value

Record plumbing

notes, needsReview, sources[] (citation, title, url, type, lastAccessed) and lastVerified carry their usual meaning from the other draft namespaces.

The pilot

The namespace opens with five jurisdictions chosen to stress the schema, not to cover ground. Hypothesis candidates: Delaware (flat fee plus a monthly rate), New York (flat), Texas (rate-shaped), South Dakota (published reinstatement schedule) and Washington (per-year fee plus a flat penalty). Every expectation here is a hypothesis until the record's own sources confirm it; the schema is expected to change during the pilot.

This is not legal advice, and nothing here is a filing instruction. Penalties move with legislative sessions; read lastVerified before trusting any of them.