Torrance and Livermore staff reports: outside license discovery at 35% of revenues
Council staff reports from Torrance and Livermore show how outside business license discovery is priced:
- Torrance: 35% of revenues collected from discovery services, and 25% from audit services
- Livermore: a contingency fee of 35% of revenues received
Before contracting out, the Torrance report says, the process was administered in-house by Finance staff.
Both reports are public; the links are below.
Sources: Torrance staff report, Livermore staff report
How we check a license file for a contractor: name, address, people
Before a business goes on a list as not found, we search the government's license file for each of these:
- every name on the state contractor record, with INC, LLC and similar words removed
- the record's street number and street name
- each person the state's public personnel file lists on the licence
A business is listed only when none of these found a row.
We drop every candidate we cannot resolve, including any whose address the Census Geocoder does not place inside the city limits.
Each listed business keeps the names and address tried and the date the file was read, so license staff can repeat the lookup.
449 contractor records for one city; 25 not on its license file
On 20 October 2026 we built a free sample for one California city from public records only: the California Contractors State License Board (CSLB) master list and the city's open-data Active Business Licenses file.
How the count narrowed:
- 449 CSLB licence rows give the city as record city; 435 have primary status CLEAR
- 241 are corporations, LLCs and partnerships; sole owners were left out
- 43 candidates matched no row of the file by name, address or a person on the licence, and the Census Geocoder placed them inside the city
- 25 of those are listed in the sample
The sample states only what the public record shows. The city's staff decide each business's status from their own records and rules.
Sources: CSLB public data portal