Licensure Check Up: Be Ready for 2025!

Contributed by the Lawyers at WRW Legal, PLLC: Wendy Russell Wiener, Lauren Pettine and Henry Thompson

As the new year approaches, each business should be engaged in both reflection and anticipation.  Ensuring that all your licenses, both facility and individual, are current and properly renewed is a key to ensuring you get off to a good start in 2025.  This seems such a basic idea which might be why so many businesses fail to secure, maintain and renew their licenses each year.  Consider these:

1. Many state regulators’ budgets are supported, partly or wholly, by the fines the regulator generates from the industry. Put more simply, when you fail to renew your license the time you operate “on” the expired license is actually unlicensed practice.  States impose fines for unlicensed practice that range from small to $10,000 per occurrence and more. Let’s focus on “per occurrence” here.  That means that every time you see a family while your license is expired, you have engaged in unlicensed practice.  And, we have seen a funeral establishment with its own crematory penalized like this resulting from a single call:

• $10,000 fine for making arrangements while license expired
• $10,000 fine for embalming the remains of that decedent
• $10,000 fine for cremating the remains of that decedent.

So, when you screw up, the state wins.

2. Facility licenses and individual licenses, including those for interns and apprentices, do not always (or often) expire at the same time. You should maintain a schedule of license issuance and expiration dates that includes a date for submission of the renewal of each.  One of our clients paid nearly $100,000 in administrative fines because its interns were not properly licensed, both initially and upon renewal.  The fines, though individually very small, were based on the number of decedents the interns interacted with at an extremely high call volume care center.  Fines like these are easily avoidable with some attention to detail.
3. A change of location usually invalidates the facility license. If the new year will bring about a move for your business, know that when that move occurs your license will not move with it in most states.  So, if you see families at the new location before its license is issued, each family you see is your facility engaged in unlicensed practice (perhaps many instances of unlicensed practice).  Refer to #1 above for scary consequences of doing so.  In many states, it’s simply a matter of notifying the regulator and passing an inspection, while in others a move means a new application for an operating license.
4. Don’t think it’s someone else’s responsibility to ensure licenses are up to date. Though each business should know that its facilities are licensed and when the facility and individual licenses must be renewed, do not rely on anyone else to ensure your own license is in force. Check your regulator’s website for licensure periods, CE requirements and your own licensure status.  Did you know that failure to amass enough CE credits can also invalidate your license in some states?  You must know if your license is valid before you engage in any practice requiring licensure.

Ultimately, end of year is the best time to plan for the coming year and checking in on all the licenses required to do what you do must be a part of that check in.