A Second Look at Georgia's Revised Intrastate Crowdfunding Rules

Abstract

At the time of the earlier SSRN article about Georgia, it was not public knowledge of the role of NASAA, or the N. C. Secretary of State, in coordinating the political efforts across state and national boundaries. The N. C. Secretary of State had decided to keep her initiatives at NASAA secret, and hidden from the public, including the members of the North Carolina General Assembly, where she had attempted to pass her version of the bill in 2013, and again in 2015.

Subsequent to those articles about Georgia, further examination of the laws adopted in 2014 and 2015, by 16 other state legislatures, revealed a common template, whose genesis was unknown to non-NASAA members. This was just like the research of the Jesus Seminar, whose investigators kept coming across text in the Biblical apocrypha of hundreds of unrelated documents that had the same basic language.

All the state laws had exactly the same language and format as the template created by the North Carolina Secretary of State.

All the other states relied on the defective North Carolina template, which incorporated into law, administrative rules that should have either been left to various state administrators, or left out entirely, from any rules. Putting the rules into the legislation subjected CEOs of companies to both civil and criminal prosecution for violation of any minor transgression, as interpreted by hundreds of state bureaucrats.

Keywords: crowdfunding, regional economic development, georgia

JEL Classification: M13, N22, O18