I know this is bringing an old thread back to life, but just in case anyone else might be in a similar situation, I thought I'd post an update.
The process here is that you go to the clerk of the court and file a "Warrant in Debt" against the registered agent of the company. You can call the SEC and get that info (I think it was the SEC). Once that is filed, they give you a court date that's about 45 days out, which gives them up to 30 days to serve the warrant.
In our case, we thought for sure that once they got the warrant, they'd reach out and make some attempt to pay us. Nope. Not a peep.
Apparently there's really two outcomes. One is they show up in court and deny they owe it, at which point the judge will then set a trial date and you'll have to come back another day and go through that process, or two, they show up and admit they owe the money and the judge will award you a judgement.
That dings their credit pretty hard (I think our accountant told us 100-200 points off their credit score), and it stays on their record for a while. Our accountant said it's a really bad thing to have on your credit record.
At that point, it's up to you to pursue methods of getting paid. You can then start the process of wage garnishment or seizing property if the court allows, but those are all separate processes that take additional filings in court systems and you'll have to go through all of that.
In our case, we walked up to the bench, the Judge asked him "Do you owe them the money" and he said "Yes sir", and the Judge said "Judgement in your favor" and that was the end of it. Took about 15 seconds. I asked the Judge what do we do next, and he said "Work out a payment plan with him" and I said "Your Honor, if we could work out a payment plan with him, we wouldn't be standing here". He said "That's why I awarded you the Judgement, step outside and work it out, if he doesn't pay, come back to the court and we'll take the next step."
We went outside the court, told him what we'd take on a monthly basis, told him if he missed a single payment by a single day, we'd haul him back in court and start going after his assets.
To date, he's paid on the due date every single time. Funny how he didn't have money to make payments before, but he appears to now......
Plus, the court allows you to charge 6% interest on all money owed from the time of the Judgement, so we'll get a little extra cash from that, along with the cost to file the Warrant in Debt.
It was an interesting process. In some ways, I'm glad we went through it because now we have a lot better understanding of the system.
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