As you may know, North Carolina and Raleigh, in particular, have in recent years established themselves as blossoming hubs of entrepreneurship in the U.S. And, as the North Carolina entrepreneurial community continues to grow, the N.C. General Assembly has on multiple occasions, attempted to enact legislation designed to produce further growth and make crowdfunding that growth easier. Like other states who have addressed and ultimately adopted this type of crowdfunding legislation, NC has based the law on the federal JOBS Act (Jumpstart Our Business Startups Act), which was passed by Congress in 2012 but has not yet gone into effect because the SEC has thus far failed to adopt and implement a set of rules regulating certain exemptions that it creates under federal securities law.
Generally speaking, crowdfunding is a form of fund raising used by organizations to raise money from a large number of individuals who want to support their projects, usually via the Internet and by using websites such as Kickstarter. The federal JOBS Act was enacted as an effort to make it easier for small businesses to raise money this way, and NC has (at least somewhat) tried to pass its own version of the law to address the issue on a state level and to pick up the slack left by the SEC. Despite considering this bill in two separate legislative years, the bill has yet to be passed and has been delayed yet again. The General Assembly will likely consider the matter again in the 2015 session and hopefully then this law will be passed.
For additional information on this subject, including a more in depth look at the law, please visit the following article, NCGA fails to Jump Start Our Businesses with Crowdfunding Legislation, written by Jillian DeCamp, attorney and lobbyist with Poyner Spruill’s government relations section.
