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Availability: Company register

To what extent is company information available as structured open data?

Definitions and Identification

A national company register should contain details of companies that are incorporated within that country. This should include basic company information, such as company name, legal form, status, and registered address, as well as unique identifiers for each company, structured data on company accounts, and details of each director.

Some countries have only a few forms of corporate entities and registration practices; others have many, from private limited firms, to partnerships, mutual societies, financial institutions, and listed companies. Responsibility for company registration may belong to national registrars, handled through national gazettes, delegated to business associations and chambers of commerce, or to commercial franchise holders operating the registry. Listed companies in particular are subject to the disclosure requirements of the stock exchange on which they are listed, which can have substantial variations, particularly with respect to the information available on shareholders.

For the purpose of this indicator, focus on limited liability companies or the equivalent.

Note: Many countries operate corporate registration at a sub-national level. However, it is increasingly common to find systems that aggregate or search across sub-national registers. For example, Colombia and Germany both have comprehensive portals to access information from local registrars, and Canada has a beta service covering seven of Canada’s provinces and territories. A notable exception at present is the United States, although third parties have been able to aggregate data from the majority of states.

If there are multiple forms of limited liability company in this country operating under different frameworks, you should focus your assessment on the most common domestic form, as identified in the World Bank's Doing Business report. If there are notable variations in the assessment you would make for other common forms of company, please briefly comment on this in the justification.

Starting points

  • Sources:
    • The Open Company Data Index includes assessments for most countries in the world; the small print at the bottom of country pages provides links to company register websites. A some assessments were carried out as early as 2012, you will need to check the current state of data availability carefully by reviewing the register itself.
    • The World Bank's Doing Business report provides details of the relevant registrar in each country.
  • Search:
    • The company register page for details of data downloads or APIs.
  • Consult:
    • Third parties who appear to be using bulk data from the company register to ask whether they access this from an open data source or via some other route.

What to look for?

To complete the assessment for this question you will need to access and explore the available data. This may involve running queries on datasets to check the variety of fields included. Look for well-structured data that could be accessed or read into a database row by row.

Look for evidence that can answer the following questions:

  • Is company information available as structured, open data?
  • What company data is available?
    • Does the dataset have a field with a unique identifier for each company?
    • Is basic company information available, including company name, legal form, status, and registered address?
    • Are annual accounts for each registered company available as structured data?
    • Is information about the directors of each company, including names and a unique identifier, available?

National and sub-national considerations

In some countries company registration is a sub-national responsibility, carried out by individual states, regions or cities.

To achieve the highest scores on this indicator, it should be possible to easily access data about all companies in a country. This might be achieved by:

  • Having a central register of companies;
  • Government providing an aggregation service that brings together data from local registers; or
  • Having standardized or comparable-quality data available from every sub-national register, such that a third party can easily aggregate the data.

To assess countries where company registration is organized sub-nationally, researchers should select the strongest example of sub-national practice, and then indicate whether this is an outlier or an example of widespread practice. If relevant, note in the justification any barriers that might prevent third parties from aggregating data from different sub-national registers.

Show/hide supporting questions

Existence

  • Is this data available online in any form?
    • Data is not available online.
      Supporting questions: Are there other offline ways to access this data in the country? (e.g., attending an office to inspect it).
    • Data is available, but not as a result of government action.
      Supporting questions: If government is not providing access to data, how is this data available? Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.
    • Data is available from government, or because of government actions.
      Supporting questions: Please provide a URL(s) for where this data can be found.

Elements

  • Data fields and quality:

  • The dataset contains unique identifiers for each company. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: If company information data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where company identifiers are located.

    If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  • Basic company information, including company name, legal form, status, and registered address. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially: If one or more of the basic company data features is not covered, please list which (e.g. registered address).

    If Partially or Yes: If company information data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where basic company information is located.

  • The data contains details of each director. (No, Partially, Yes)

  • Structured data on company accounts is available for each registered company. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: If company information data can be found in multiple datasets, please provide the URL where company account data is located.

    If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  • Data includes information about individuals' sex and/or gender. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe what data includes sex and/or gender information.

  • Data openness, timing, and structure:

  • Dataset is available free of charge. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  • Data is openly licensed. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If No: If there are explicit restrictions placed on re-use of the dataset, briefly describe those here.

    If Partially or Yes: If the data is provided with an explicit open license, please provide the name of the license, or a link to it here.

  • Data is available in all the country’s official or national languages. If the country has no official or national languages, data is available in the major languages of the country. (No, Partially, Yes) Assess this against the list of official, national, or in-use languages you provided as part of your response to the governance indicator that asks, "To what extent do relevant laws, regulations, policies, and guidance require that data collection and publication processes be available in the country’s official or national languages?"

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe the language coverage available.

  • There are accessible and open official tools available to help users explore data. (No, Partially , Yes) Answer 'Partially' if tools make it possible to get at extracts of data without having to download a full dataset. Answer 'Yes' if there is an interactive tool that displays user-filtered extracts of the data to answer simple questions without downloading data at all.

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please provide URL.

    If Partially : What are the main barriers to accessibility and usability?

  • Data is timely and updated. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: When was the most recent update to this dataset?

  • Historical data is available that allows users to track change over time. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

    If Partially or Yes: For what time period(s) (e.g., start and end dates) is data available?

  • Data is provided in machine-readable format(s) (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where this machine-readable data can be found. (Additional URLs can be included in the justification and supporting evidence)

    If Partially or Yes: Please provide a comma separated list of the formats available? (E.g. csv, json)

    If Partially: What prevents you from assessing this data as fully machine-readable?

  • The machine-readable dataset is available as a whole (No, Partially, Yes) Answer no if it's only possible to access individual records; Answer partially if it's possible to export extracts of the data; Answer yes if there are bulk downloads or APIs providing access to the whole dataset without financial, technical or legal barriers.

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please provide a URL where bulk download access is available or described.

    If Partially or Yes: If bulk access is provided through an API, please provide a link to where the API is described.

    If Partially: Please briefly explain your 'Partially' answer.

  • Negative scoring:

  • This information is missing required data. (There is no evidence of data gaps., There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing., There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.) In cases where the indicator itself identifies a dataset(s) to assess against or a separate governance indicator has asked you to determine data requirements of a relevant governing framework, assess against that. In cases where there is no such identified dataset(s) or related governance indicator, assess based on the parameters laid out in the publication of the information (e.g., are some fields entirely empty when they shouldn't be?), your local knowledge (e.g., if the data is supposed to include information for all public officials, does the number of total entries look right?), and any broader research you may have done for this theme (e.g., have media articles decried the incompleteness of the data?).

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If There is evidence that a portion of mandated data is missing. or There is evidence of widespread omissions in mandated data.: Please briefly explain.

  • The availability of this data has been affected by government response to COVID-19. (No, Partially, Yes)

    Supporting questions (conditional)

    If Partially or Yes: Please briefly describe how COVID-19 affected the availability of this data.

Extent

  • How comprehensive is the data assessed for this question?
    • The data assessed covers one or more localities, but there are many other localities without available data, or with data of a lesser quality.
      Supporting questions: Which locality does this data cover?
    • The data assessed covers one or more localities, and is a representative example of the kind of data that can be found for most but not all localities.
      Supporting questions: Which localities does this data cover?
    • The data assessed provides national coverage.

Company registration data, and company identifiers in particular, are used in a wide range of contexts, including:

  • Supporting anti-corruption and anti-money laundering investigations;
  • Enabling business intelligence and corporate due diligence;
  • Facilitating business processes and data management;
  • Supporting cross-border and wealth taxation;
  • Generating economic statistics and supporting economic policymaking;
  • Analyzing social, environmental, and equity issues across the economy; and
  • Improving consumer choice.

Sustained civil society campaigns have called for greater openness of company records, particularly in the European Union (see, for example, Quintanilla and Darbishire 2016). In 2019, the EU Open Data Directive included “Companies and company ownership” as one of six data categories “having a particular high value for the economy and society,” although campaigners have expressed concern that implementation of this commitment has been slow, in part because governments are reluctant to challenge current funding model of registers that charge for access to data (Domínguez 2021).

The distributed and fragmented nature of corporate registration both within and across countries has meant that, while trade and financial flows have globalized, information on firms has remained surprisingly siloed. The Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation maintain a list of over 700 business registers around the world. A number of notable efforts to address this fragmented landscape include: the creation of proprietary company information products, such as Dun and Bradstreet’s company information products, used particularly in corporate due diligence and supply chain management; the work of OpenCorporates to scrape existing company registers and publish them as open data; and the creation of the global Legal Entity Identifier (LEI) at the request of the Financial Stability Board to support identification of entities involved in financial markets. However, it remains unclear how far interested parties have effective access to structured and open data on firms across the world—this indicator seeks to address this knowledge gap.

To develop this indicator we have considered both international agreements on company registration, and user needs for corporate data. We drew in particular on interpretive notes of Financial Accountability Task Force Recommendation 24 which state that “All companies created in a country should be registered in a company registry” and that registration should include a “company name, proof of incorporation, legal form and status, the address of the registered office, basic regulating powers (e.g., memorandum & articles of association), [and] a list of directors” and that there should be mechanisms to keep this basic information up to date (FATF/OECD 2020, 91).

This indicator should be broadly comparable to the Open Data Barometer indicator that assessed the availability of company register data, defined as: “A list of registered (limited liability) companies in the country including name, unique identifier, and additional information such as address, registered activities. The data in this category does not need to include detailed financial data such as balance sheet, etc.” (ODB.2013.D7).