You still have to register as a business entity with each state's Secretary of State office if you employ a person in that state. I expect there are numerous re

You still have to register as a business entity with each state's Secretary of State office if you employ a person in that state. I expect there are numerous reasons for this, but certainly among them is that the unemployment systems, healthcare benefits systems, and part of the tax system are all regulated/managed at the state level and so the state needs records of entities to deal with that. My company (Auxon) is Delaware C-corp headquartered in Portland, OR, but with a distributed team in different parts of the US and Canada. We use Gusto to manage much of the ongoing headache of maintaining legal compliance across multiple regions. However, even with that there's often a manual bootstrapping process that has to happen that's still the old school bureaucratic navigation approach. In some cases folks like Zenefits, Gusto, and ADP have services and capabilities to act as an agent for your business to make all the state-by-state stuff as invisible to you as possible, but it's not a perfect system. That said, we've not found the caveats to be particularly onerous either, so YMMV.