Stanley and Kay maintained that only their agency had a fiduciary duty to the broker, so that whatever debt they owed because of the personal guarantees could be discharged in bankruptcy. A federal court disagreed. It was true that, by itself, the fact that the couple had personally guaranteed the agency’s debt to the broker did not put them in a fiduciary relationship with the broker. The critical factor was that Stanley’s and Kay’s personal actions had created the debt owed by the agency to the broker. They had withheld money that should have gone into the trust account and had depleted that account to the point that checks were returned for insufficient funds. The court refused to allow Stanley and Kay to use bankruptcy to avoid the consequences of their own misconduct.

As required in the federal legislation, the major credit bureaus have set up a toll-free number: 888-5-OPT-OUT (888-567-8688) that is required to be provided with the offer of credit. When you call, you can either opt out by telephone for two years or request a form you can use to opt out permanently. By calling the same number, you can also be put back on marketing lists after having been removed from them. In cases of joint credit, both parties may be required to opt out before the solicitations will stop.

Maxine worked in New York for a financial information services provider. When she moved to Florida, her employer agreed to allow her to telecommute. Maxine was responsible for the same tasks that she had handled in New York, only now from her laptop in Florida she logged onto her employer’s mainframe computer each workday.

Two years into the telecommuting arrangement, Maxine’s company decided to end it. When she turned down an offer to return to New York, Maxine was without a job. She was denied unemployment benefits in Florida following a ruling that she had voluntarily quit her job without good cause. However, the Florida agency advised Maxine that she might be eligible to receive unemployment benefits in New York.

In what may be the first court decision of its kind on interstate telecommuters, New York’s highest court also ruled that Maxine was ineligible for benefits, but for a different reason. Under New York law, a threshold requirement for eligibility is that the employee’s entire service for the employer, except for incidental work, must be “localized” in New York. Maxine argued unsuccessfully that her services were localized in New York, at her employer’s mainframe computer, notwithstanding that she initiated this service on her laptop in Florida. The court ruled instead that the physical presence of the employee determines in which state a telecommuter is located. For work done while she was located in Florida, Maxine was not eligible for unemployment compensation in New York.

When the new economy met the old unemployment insurance system in Maxine’s case, the court stayed with principles that predate the age of computers. The outcome was dictated by two rules that are uniformly recognized: All of an individual’s employment should be allocated to one state, which should be solely responsible for paying benefits; and that state should be the one in which it is most likely that the individual will become unemployed and seek work.

Unemployment has the greatest economic impact on the community in which the unemployed individual resides, and benefits generally are linked to that area’s cost of living. Legislators and judges from previous generations could not have foreseen today’s world of interstate telecommuting, but the rules they created are still valid. For better or worse, Maxine was tied to Florida, where she was physically present, and she could not look to New York for unemployment benefits.