Originally Posted by
Justin Frye
With all due respect, everyone of those items excluded are either law enforcement, dealing with financial disclosures for very specific reasons, work done for not-for-profits, or exclusive employees of PI's or attorneys. The above quote was the part of section 83 that was left out reiterated thats any for profit investigation work has to been done by a licensee as stated in section 71.
The main exemption is:
1. Any person regularly employed as special agent, detective or investigator exclusively by one employer in connection with the affairs of that employer only;
If you check with your attorney, he/she will concur that the "affairs of" the employer can be the employer's lawful clients, who can retain a non-pi agency for background checks, missing persons, court records, integrity cases, neighborhood checks, and a whole host of cases that do not need a state PI License. (This is the same exemption that all mystery shopping companies use for their investigative types of "shops")
The employer than hires an internal private investigator to handle the case. But that internal PI cannot overly advertise on their own for independent clients as a "PI"> They can, however, advertised as a "case examiner" or "intelligence officer" or "intelligence agent".
And yes, if an unlicensed PI has a business card that says "John Smith, Private Investigator" with the office name as "Law Offices of Perry Mason", then he does not need a state PI License. The same thing if his office name says "ABC Insurance", or "Wal-Mart".
That is not to say we recommend anyone to advertise for regulated cases, such as surveillance, but if a company has a generic name such as IBM, Inc, and they advertise in Colorado as a PI Agency (with no state PI Agency License in New York), then they can easily sub-contract out the Colorado case portion of the case that requires a NY licensed PI.
Example:
Colorado Agency advertises for:
Locate Lost Loved One.
Client pays retainer to Colorado agency of $500.00
Colorado Agency does not need PI License anywhere to locate loved one, and find loved ones in New York.
But then Client then asks for background check and surveillance.
Colorado Agency receives $4000 retainer, and uses NY case examiner (non-licensed PI) to perform background check (an unregulated assignment), and sub-contracts surveillance to licensed PI agency in NY.
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Or better,
Colorado PI agency uses the IPIU Lifetime Corporate Membership to obtain a sponsor in New York to obtain their own NY Agency License without having to wait 3 years. That way they could openly advertise for both unregulated and regulated cases in NY without the need to subcontract portions of a regulated cases.