Recently businesses starting receiving official looking letters from
a company called Personal Concepts. On the envelope there are
bold letters that state “Important- Open immediately” and in the
top left hand corner the words “Compliance Service Department”
are printed.

Those of us who have owned a business have received similar
looking letters from the States we do business in and the Federal
Government. When you open this letter you read the following.
As an employer in your (they insert your town and state) you
must comply with the new 2009 labor law posting requirements.
Failure to do so may lead to government finds of up to $17,000.00
and/or audits for non-compliance.

They then go into a diatribe on all the federal and state laws
that require you to have certain posters hung up in your business
for your employees to see. On the bottom of the front page is an
order form where you can order these posters for $19.95 plus
$5.95 shipping and handling.

I have received several of these in the past. This company is
selling U.S. Compliance posters, however, their notices lead you
to believe that if you do not buy their product, your business will
be fined and/or audited by the government.

Now I have no problem with a company trying to sell a product or
service. However, I do have a problem in this case with the way
they alarm and intimidate business owners into believing that you
need to purchase these or you are going to feel the wrath of the
Federal & State Governments.

They do leave out the fact that if you are a single owner and
operator of a business and have no employees or a partnership
that only you and your partners work for you do not need to
have these posters.

The last aspect to this is that if you do have employees working
for you, you can get these posters for free by contacting your
government agencies. To the credit of Personal Concepts they do
mention this on the back page at the very bottom but hide it well
in a mixed paragraph.

If you want the convenience of letting someone send you the
posters that you can get for free, send Personnel Concepts the
$26.00. ($36.00 if you want them laminated). However, if you
want them for free go to US department of Labor’s web site
for ordering them from the Federal Government and go to your
State’s Department of Labor web site for their required postings.