Small company owned by PC shadowrunners - which legal form it should be?

Question

Intro:

We are playing SR3 in Seattle, but all players and GMs are from Europe & not skilled in law, not mentioning USA/Shadowrun law.

We are seeking for something somehow believable in USA/SR3 context (so we can find more about that later and build on that).

PCs got and took offer from friendly NPC (which "owes" them a lot and is trusted and good positioned) to buy some IDs and small company. They want run that as legal front for their new IDs to have "legal source of income" and a way for customers to be able pay by official money somehow. The company would own some buildings, cars and equipement too. PCs have large net of NPC contacts, which are willing and able "buy services" from that company (while paid by PCs for that) to keep the company alive, if needed. PCs should be able secretly run mentioned company while posing as "only ordinaly employees".

Antifraud and financial teams are not usually extra interested actively investigate such "small fishes".

Question:

GM does not know, what kind of legal form that should be called (like "Freds Services, inc." or so) and what to google for.

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Background:

We play in really light "shadows", usually just some investigations, creating chaos here and there for distractration and such, PCs already killed few humans (mostly in "really excessive self defence"), but there are no visible traces to them and it is more exception, than a rule. The setting is soft and forgiving a lot, GM helps players to win many times. We just want to have fun and cinematic, not heavy drama and strugling. The "real action" takes less than half of gaming time, the rest is spend by buiding house, repairing and enhancing gear, cooking, gardening, chatting, dog shamman hiding bones on secret places ... So the following plan should succeed and work for some time and offer a lot of small activities too.

The background is, that some well hidden NPC/company collected some IDs of peoples, who died, bud was not entered as dead in system, corpses dissapeared and those IDs was "kept alive", transfered to work for some existing company "Bettys laboratories, something" (which was build and kept just for this purpose), used for who know what for years (need a lend ID to spend a week with prostitues in resort? Here is ID for the week, for some price, so you real ID get no moral harm ... style). And now the owner wants to close this "Bettys laboratories", sell all IDs to Shadows, divide the company to many idependent smaller independent sections/branches (via net of transactions) and sell them for lot of money. He have good law suport and knows what he is doing to hide the origins, but probably wants to start something different and bigger and so he want to capitalise this "Bettys laboratories" fast and discreetly. (GMs narative, why PC can buy legally clean company and new IDs, which are basically real.)

Our idea is, that that the "Fred's Services" will own a house, some cars, properly hire a (innoncent, not knowing) secretary to take phones and transfer messages around, fill legal forms for taxes and make a chair in companys house warm. All income of this company will be "arranged" somehow and spend for paying the house, secretary and couple of "employees". The company would be able to officially send an invoice for some inoncent "services" (like consultations) to ABC.inc (or DEF.inc, or who is todays customer), which would pay for it and put it into official accounting, but those "services" would be simple fictional, intangible and just way to pay the real shadowruner. Basically money laundering of some kind. "Employees" would spend part of the wage to keep "conspiracy flat" paid, part for consumables (everybody needs food & groceries) and rest on "pleasures" (like prostitues, drinks, etc.) which they would then get back in "dirty money" to buy guns and other illegal equipement.

Answer 1

It doesn't matter

I have three major reasons for this conclusion:

1. The world of Shadowrun is very different from the real world, and one of the areas in which this is most clearly true is corporate power and organization. Whatever legal and practical underpinnings there are in SR, megacorporations have radically changed the nature of government, law, and employment. Trying to come up with a real-world analogue is a red herring, because the SR setting is so different in this dimension that translating from reality doesn't work very well. The differences in corporate structure are likely to be similarly dramatic as the difference between magic in the real world (none) to SR (lots of it).

2. Shadowrun doesn't have enough mechanical systems to simulate these features of corporations anyways, even if we had a reliable framework in which to describe corporate organization in-game (which we don't, as in (1), above). Forming a limited liability corporation (LLC) has some costs and benefits associated with legal liability, as opposed to being a sole proprietorship, but SR doesn't deal with lawsuits, legal risk against personal assets, etc. With the systems SR actually details, there isn't a difference between Business, Inc., Business Corp., Business LLC, or anything else-- only the effective might of a corporation really counts for anything. SR is not a law and accounting simulator.

3. This business is going to be a front anyways, as I read the question. Its official status and organization are just smokescreens, and follow what the PCs need (as opposed to the PCs diligently following practices their business' organization suggests). This business is being formed explicitly to violate the law, not to model excellent corporate governance.

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Gameplay elements do matter, so starting with those might be better

It makes more sense to me to answer some effective questions for the DM(s) which can then be worked into the story, rather than to spend a lot of time ironing out small details which the DM has to keep track of and try to work into a story. In my experience, it's easier to start with the arc of the plot and then find details to suit than it is to expect fun narratives to come from exhaustive, otherwise-irrelevant details.

For example, I have a hard time seeing that it would matter if the PCs' business were organized as an LLC versus some other organization-- that would really only matter in the case of a lawsuit against the business, which would have to be homebrewed as SR doesn't include much legal simulation (and runners' personal assets are typically subject to more direct threats anyways).

Conversely, it might matter if the business is privately owned versus being publicly traded: a publicly traded company has more requirements for legal and financial disclosures, and could be subject to something like a hostile takeover, while a private business doesn't have those same requirements and isn't subject to those same risks.

Interesting plot developments could happen to any business, no matter how it is organized. As a DM, I would very much prefer to spend my time thinking of those plot developments and then fitting them to the details of the story than to spend my time tracking minute details that aren't simulated in the game at all, are very unlikely to matter in the game at all, and mesh poorly with the setting.

In any case, gameplay will probably be best supported by abstracting these details away. It matters if your PC needs to spend downtime managing the business, but it doesn't matter if the PC spends that downtime filling out tax form 8049c or 20183d(ii). That's the kind of detail that corporate organization imposes, and fully defining that sort of issue isn't necessarily any better than saying "you have to prepare your business tax return".

Summary: Current, real-world business organization practices don't apply to SR, and SR doesn't simulate the elements needed to be able to use a real-world accurate answer. The legal organization of the PC business is a flavor detail at most.