Five Mistakes Businesses Make When Dealing With Government

Businesses rarely fail in front of a state agency because their position is wrong. They fail because they arrived late, spoke to the wrong person, or treated a regulatory process as an adversarial proceeding when it was, in fact, an administrative one.

What follows are the five mistakes I see most often. They are not exotic. They are ordinary, and that is precisely what makes them expensive.

One. Waiting until there is a problem

The most common error is timing. A company discovers an issue — a permit condition, a licensing question, a proposed rule that would change its cost structure — and only then begins to think about who at the agency it needs to know.

By that point the useful window has usually closed. Rulemaking has a comment period. Permitting has a pre-application conference. Legislation has a committee calendar. Each of those is an invitation, and each of them expires. The businesses that fare best treat government as a standing relationship rather than an emergency service.

Two. Misreading who actually holds the authority

Organization charts are a poor guide to decision-making. In practice, the person who can solve a problem is often a division director, a staff attorney, or a technical reviewer — not the appointed official whose name is on the letterhead.

Understanding where discretion actually sits is most of the work. It is also the part that cannot be researched from a distance; it comes from having been in the building.

Three. Confusing advocacy with argument

A regulator is not a jury. Agency staff are generally trying to apply a statute correctly with limited time and imperfect information. The most persuasive submission is usually the one that makes their job easier: a clean factual record, a defensible reading of the rule, and a proposed outcome the agency can defend if it is questioned later.

Volume is not persuasion. Precision is.

Four. Sending the wrong person into the room

Companies sometimes delegate government interactions to whoever is available, then wonder why the tone of the relationship never improves. Others send senior leadership into a routine technical meeting and inadvertently escalate a matter that staff were prepared to resolve.

Matching the seniority and posture of the participants to the actual stakes is a discipline. It signals that a company understands the process it is in.

Five. Treating one interaction as the whole relationship

Every conversation with a public body is part of a record that outlasts the matter at hand. Regulators remember which companies were candid, which met their deadlines, and which quietly corrected a problem before being asked.

That reputation compounds. In North Carolina, where the relevant professional community is smaller than outsiders assume, it compounds quickly.

What good practice looks like

• Map the agencies, boards, and local bodies that touch your business before you need them.
• Calendar the comment periods and renewal dates that govern your industry.
• Keep one accountable internal owner for government relationships.
• Document what you were told, by whom, and when.
• Never let counsel's first contact with an agency be a dispute.