That’s the mildest term for how things went with registering our NFP with the Office of the Illinois Attorney General. When I started this journey in October 2024, everyone who was ever close to the NFP business would tell me that getting the tax-exempt status with the IRS was the most difficult and time-consuming task.

Indeed, registering an NFP took two days and was all online; setting up our EIN took only days and was all online as well. The trademark business took a couple of weeks, but only because we ran into some inconsistencies on the trademark holder’s website, and it took time to resolve it. Our greatest surprise, the tax-exempt letter arrived only fice weeks after we applied! Nobody could believe it, and I counted our blessings.

The last step was registering with the Illinois AG office, and that was the first thing we had to do on paper. We checked the list of documents we had to submit, both Anna and I signed them, I printed them and sent the package by Priority Mail.

A week later, I saw our registration fee check cashed, and I thought that we will recieve the confirmation letter soon. However, when the letter arrived, it was not the confirmation of the registration, but the list of things we did wrong!

We submitted the corrected package, and after that, somehting weird started to happen. People were not returning our calls, the documents we mailed were never received even though the tracking showed it ws delivered. It took many hours to reach anyone, and at some point, we were told that we abandoned the registration, because we never mailed missing information, and we had to start all over.

At that point of our odyssey, I started walking to the AG office and leaving the papers there, making sure they are all stampted as received. This didn’t stop the stream of the lost items. Also, by that time, the AG office finally introduced the online application submission system, but since we started on paper, we had to continue on paper, and it took even longer. Finally, when we received a new list of missing items, Anna and I got together online and wrote an email to our State Representative Constituent service, who saved us!

It still took several weeks! However, each time “something was missing” we took a note regarding how long it would take if our State Rep office won’t interfere. I believe, they saved us anothe six months!

My biggest regret is that I didn’t know we didn’t have to wait for this registration to apply for the Illinois Tax Exempt status! We could already have it, and now it’s another six months wait! At least, I could apply online!

And the moral of the story – Long live Constituent Service!