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Suddenly Susan
New Secretary of the State Bysiewicz gets down to business
Susan Bysiewicz, 37, took office in January as secretary of the state following three terms representing the 100th District (Middletown, Durham, Middlefield) as a Democrat in the General Assembly. A corporate lawyer by training (Yale College, Duke School of Law), she has also authored a biography of Gov. Ella T. Grasso. She lives in her native Middletown with her husband David Donaldson and their three children.
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Business New Haven
5/31/1999
By: BNH
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What should the business community know about the work that the secretary of the state's office does?
We are working on some things that we hope will make it easier to get businesses started in Connecticut, and also to increase business opportunities in Connecticut. The secretary of the state is the chief business registrar for the state, and I like to say that the secretary of the state is really the CEO of a $20 million company because our agency produces $20 million of revenue a year to the state from its commercial recording functions - incorporations, filing fees, renewal fees, UCC [Uniform Commercial Code] liens.
What's your annual budget?
It costs us $5 million a year to operate, so it's a net revenue gain to the state of about $15 million.
So, tell us what you're working
on now.
We have legislation pending now in the General Assembly to allow electronic commerce to happen in Connecticut. It will help facilitate commerce because it will make electronic signatures valid in the state. Right now, you can't sign any contracts over the Internet because courts don't recognize the electronic signature. We worked with the Law Revision Commission to draft legislation to allow that. For our office, this would also mean that we will be able to [process] incorporations and UCC lien filings electronically. This will be a big help to our business customers because it will save them time and money.
Do other states do this already?
No. We will be the first if we are able to make this happen. Also, by September we will have all of the state's corporations and UCC information up on the Internet and available for free. That's important because, putting on my hat as a business lawyer and remembering having to send paralegals over to the secretary of the state's office to search through the tissue-paper filings. A decade ago there was a big lag time in the filings, and it was wreaking havoc in the banking community and the business community - the banking community didn't want to give loans because the lien filings weren't up to date, and the business community couldn't get loans because the banking community didn't have enough information. So starting in September people will be able to do their own searches from their desks.
What's available on your Web site today?
Technology is a big focus of ours. We have all of the business forms and elections forms up on our Web site so people can download the forms, and we're working on that electronic-signature [legislation] to get to the point where you can pull up the form, complete it and send it right then and there. That will streamline things tremendously for businesses.
What else is available on the site?
We have industry-specific export information that shows which countries are looking for particular products and services. Many Connecticut businesses export, and those that do are [outpacing] their peers in terms of revenues from 15 to 40 percent. We see ourselves as a purveyor of information, and we want to make information that's helpful to businesses more accessible. For business that haven't gotten to that point [actively exporting], this is a way to for a company that produces, say, chemicals to say, 'Okay, which countries are looking for the products that we sell?' We also are working on links to many other government agencies and offices that do economic-development work. One of the things we've found is that there are a lot of agencies out there that are trying to do the same things we are. Our office is the entry point to state government for most businesses, because we are the first place most businesses go when they're starting their business. We've been working with the governor's office to try and streamline processes for permits and licensing. It was kind of shocking to find out, for instance, that just to start a convenience store in Connecticut requires 25 different licenses and permits.
One piece of legislation you have advocated for would protect the
privacy of Social Security numbers. Where does that stand, and why is it important?
Our proposal is twofold: One, to say that registrars need not collect Social Security numbers for voter-registration purposes. The second part is that town halls and registrars would not have to turn over Social Security numbers to jury administrators or other government agencies or third parties. The problem was that the jury administrator was not just taking the numbers, but then they were turning over the Social Security numbers - along with birth dates and names and addresses - to a private vendor. That was creating all sorts of concerns since voters were led to believe that those numbers would remain safely in Town Hall and never be given to others without the consent of those people.
You worked hard to get this job, winning both a primary and a general election last year. Why did you want it so badly? What was your vision?
I thought it was a great way to take all of the things I had learned about election law in my career as a state legislator - I actually ran the committee that oversaw the secretary of the state's office and wrote the election and campaign-finance laws - along with my experience as a business lawyer. I was at [the Hartford law firm] Robinson & Cole up until the time I got elected to the legislature in 1992. So I had a lot of ideas about what the secretary of the state's office could be doing, particularly on the commercial-recording side. These are some of the things I had in mind then, and it's nice to be able to work in a job where I get to make a difference both in the elections side and the business side. It's a unique opportunity, and I'm very pleased to have it.
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