T w e n t y S i d e d

I need a business bank account before I can sell a game on Steam. I’ve formed a company and we’ve got an EIDIt’s like a tax number for your business. to use. Technically, I SHOULD be able to open a business bank account with this. But because of bureaucratic shenanigans I can’t begin to explain, we can’t actually find a bank willing to do this. They all insist that we need to form an S-Corp (expensive, time-consuming, and more complex than the problem we’re trying to solve, with the additional problem that it will make our taxes an even bigger job come tax day) or file for a fictitious name (costs hundreds of dollars in this state, takes weeks, and offers me nothing of value in return. (No, it doesn’t actually copyright or trademark the name from misuse. That’s ANOTHER set of paperwork. This just attaches a name (that we can’t change) to the EID.)

The problem isn’t that you can’t solve this. The problem is that there are a hundred apparent solutions. (Different banks. Different forms. Pay someone to do this for us.) Finding the one solution that will waste the least time and money is the problem.

Part of the confusion is that it’s really hard to parse some of these forms. Usually you can tell when you’ve got the wrong form. If you’re a single person and you’re filling out a form that asks about your spouse and children, then you can be reasonably confident you’re barking up the wrong tree and you need a different form. But in our case ALL of the forms feel wrong. Everything related to doing business was designed in the middle of the last century, where opening a business means you plan to do business locally. Everyone assumes I want to sell pancakes on main street. There’s no concept of a “one-man international business”. Sometimes it’s not possible to truthfully and accurately fill out a form because it asks questions that don’t make sense.

Imagine you’re opening a furniture store, but the business form has a REQUIRED field that wants to know the license plate numbers of the cars you’ll be using to deliver the pizzas. That’s the level of incoherent stupidity we’re dealing with right now.

In any event, the technology problems in Pseudoku don’t matter because the project is stalled by bureaucracy.