Who can give surety?

The concept of suretyship has been around since the Roman Empire. An example would be when a town needed a road built and the engineer that wanted to build it got a letter of surety from a Roman Senator providing assurance that the engineer is capable of building the road.

In the early 1900's the U.S. passed the Miller Act that required all federal jobs to have performance and payment surety bonds. All the states and many other municipalities passed similar "Little Miller" acts to protect publicly funded work.

The most common providers of surety today are insurance corporations. They are a small isolated part of the insurance industry and are regulated by the various state departments of insurance.

The federal law does have a provision for a personal surety that would allow an individual to post collateral with a surety bond. This form of surety is not prevalent nor used in the privates sector. It has also recently been addressed in an effort to better regulate these unregulated forms of surety.