Resolving issues with overdue payments for freelance work A freelance client of mine is months behind in their payments and is requiring digital account access prior to paying. What are my rights? The client doesn't read or respond to emails or phone calls. The client recently appointed a point person for me to discuss these past due payments with. The point person requested more work prior to payment. I declined and offered a payment schedule. The point person responded harshly, dissolving the business relationship and demanding digital web/email account access immediately prior to any payment.
Law SE is not for direct legal advice. You're in the middle of a contract dispute that has turned acrimonious and need to find legal help. Google for free or low cost legal aid in your area. If this "point person" has mentioned a lawyer or made legal threats, you do need legal help.
It is legal for a company to ask for any information they want as a condition of doing business with you, so long as their request isn't proscribed by law. I don't know of any jurisdiction where a request for banking or credit information is illegal. (In this case, however, it does seem like you are being phished. You could report the matter to your country's consumer protection agency.)
You entered into two contracts, one with a Canadian travel agency and on with an airline (maybe multiple airlines). The travel agency acted as your agent, in securing the booking with the airline. In each case, the contract reduces to the promise &quot;I will give you this in exchange for that&quot;. The other parties did what they were supposed to do, now you are legally required to pay up. It is highly unlikely that your agreements included a clause to the effect that if they don't get the money from you within a particular short time-frame, the ticket is free. There can be a statutory limit on how long a civil claim (unpaid debt) is valid, but that is measured in years, not months. You can certainly negotiate with the party seeking payment (I assume it is the travel agency). If the agency clearly, unambiguously and explicitly states that they will accept half payment to settle the debt, then if they try to sue you in court, you can produce that email plus proof of payment as evidence that there is no debt. Thanking you for an offer is not clear, unambiguous and explicit acceptance of half payment.
Whether or not this would be allowed would generally call for a more fact rich situation than the one presented in the original question, that would cast light upon why a retailer might be inclined to refuse to accept payment. Hypothetical legal questions that presume that people are acting irrationally for no good reason are generally ill posed and don't have meaningful answers. Sometimes, there might be a legitimate privacy interest implicated if the invoicing party acknowledged a payment from a third party. For example, suppose that the invoice was for a paternity test and payment would confirm that the incapacitated person actually obtained a paternity test. Sometimes, there are legal rights beyond payment that are implicated and the reasonableness of a refusal might hinge on those rights. For example, suppose that the invoice was for an option to keep using an oil well. Payment of the invoice by the deadline would keep the oil well operating and the land owner sending the invoice might prefer that it not be paid so that the oil well would be shut down. Quite a few contracts are structured in this way. Maybe the invoice was for the right to purchase a first edition of a book when it was finally released, for example, and not paying it would free up a copy for someone else at a price that had increased in the meantime. Or, suppose that the invoice were for unpaid taxes and payment of the taxes would prevent property from being seized for sale by tax authorities, and the taxing authority would prefer that the invoice was not paid so that the valuable property could be liquidated. But, it is hard to imagine that there would be any reason that an ordinary retailer with an ordinary bill would ever refuse payment, although I suppose that this might trigger an interest or penalty amount owed under the contract for late payment. If that were the case, the principal of mitigation of damages, which says that a party to a contract must take all reasonable steps to mitigate their damages, might obligate the retailers to accept the payment or forfeit the penalty amounts that the retailer could have avoided as damages by accepting payment. I doubt that an undelivered tender of payment from a third party would eliminate the obligation, but, it might limit the damages that could be claimed as in the scenario above.
Is It Legally Binding? While their customer service sucks, your oral authorization of the charge is legally binding (I take payments that way almost every day in my own business, it isn't an unusual business practice in small professional businesses). You authorize oral authorization of payments over the phone in the credit card agreement that your credit card company sends you every year that you don't read and throw away. The provider has to collect more information for a credit card payment over the phone than they do for an in person swipe in a credit card machine (e.g. your credit card billing address) and they are fully responsible for wrongful charges if they deal with an imposter. By regularly checking your credit card statements, you can confirm that no incorrect charges are present. Tax Issues If you want to take a tax deduction for non-reimbursed medical expenses, you simply need to tote up the amounts your are entitled to from your own records, and put it in the appropriate box on your tax forms. You don't have to attach documentation to your return. If the IRS disputes your payment, you can offer up your credit card statements and your photograph of the receipts, and if necessary, medical records to show that you received the services, to show that the payment really happened and are deductible. Your credit card company's records, reflected in your monthly credit card statements, are considered very reliable for tax purposes. You have the burden of proving that the expense was incurred and is of a type that qualifies for a deduction by a preponderance of the evidence in the event that there is a dispute that is litigated, which means that you must show that it is more likely than not that you incurred a deductible expense of that kind in that amount in that tax year. Privacy Issues While there are financial information privacy issues associated with this transaction, HIPAA, which covers medical records, normally wouldn't apply to a credit card payment that indicates the person paid, the person paying, the account, the amount and the date, but not a description of the medical services provided or to whom they were provided, which is what is normally on a credit card receipt. The financial privacy issues are also partially addressed by the provider's merchant agreement with the credit card company which contains terms requiring them to maintain certain kinds of security with respect to your financial information (which is not to say that the provider actually follows all of the requirements of their merchant agreement scrupulously, which is why data breaches happen all the time in businesses both large and small).
If you don't respond to the letter, you will be penalized. So why would they send you a pre-stamped envelope? Paying for communications is just part of your everyday life and shouldn't come out of tax payers' money.
My lawyer answers my question, thinking he is giving legal advice to a non-client when he is actually answering a client's question. But if you read the FAQ, posts at law.stachexchange are not legal advice. In fact, questions that are so specific as to risk becoming a request for legal advice are routinely closed. But let's go further: The issue at hand is not the one your lawyer is hired to help you with. He is not your lawyer for that issue. Even if we considered the relationship through law.stackexchange legal representation, the conversation would not be privileged. You are posting in a public forum, and expecting reply in the same way. You are free to waive the privilege of communication with your lawyer, and you are doing that by using this way of communicating with him. At this point, the only thing your lawyer would have done would be voluntarily giving for free some info that he could have billed you for. What exactly would be the issue here? It is exactly what pro bono is for. The only way to breach confidentiality would be if your lawyer were to convey things that you said to him confidentially to the public, but here it would not be relevant if the OPs author were already his customer or not.
This has very little legal effect. It means that someone forgot to update their annual registration and pay the fee and could be resolved in half an hour with a small late fee payment. It is a sign of slight sloppiness, but is only sometimes evidence of something more serious. For example, if a company moves to a new location without remembering to inform the Secretary of State, it might not get the annual report notice and thus fail to file. And, a company rarely has an occasion to double check that it is in good standing. Usually, the only legal consequence is that the company can't commence a lawsuit without bringing itself into good standing and that another company can steal its business name (if it can do so without violating a common law trademark arising from use of the name). It does not significantly change the rights of parties dealing with the company in terms of property ownership, contract rights, etc. This said, closer scrutiny than a company without that issue might be in order and the fact that you are checking at all means that there might have been other reasons apart from this fact to be concerned.