Why are officers missing, incomplete, or out of date?

Officer data comes from Secretary of State filings, so it is only as complete and current as what the state publishes. A few edge cases are below:

• The state does not publish officers. A few states, New Jersey in particular, do not release officer names in their public data or share them with data providers. Businesses registered only in those states return no officers even though the state has them on file.

• The state publishes officers only at formation or annual report. Officer changes made between filings are not visible until the next filing is processed. A business that changed hands or was reinstated after dissolution can show the previous officers until its next report is filed and ingested by the state's systems.

• Officers are aggregated across every state the business is registered in. If a business has foreign registrations, people filed on those registrations appear too, which is why a business can show more officers than its home-state filing lists. The states field on each officer shows where they were filed.

If you know the officers and they are not on the filing, submit them in officer_names. They will be screened against watchlists and monitored even if they do not match, and the match fields will tell you they were not found. For businesses where the filing does not name the owners at all, most customers fall back to applicant-provided documents such as an operating agreement.

If a filing on the state’s own website shows officers that Baselayer does not return, send us the business ID and the state and we will check the ingestion for that state.