Officer lookup by year works differently: snapshot registers versus event-log ones

"Who was running this company in 2019?" sounds like a question a public register should answer in a second. It usually cannot.

Most registers do not store a history of who held office. They store the answer as of the last filing and keep older filings as images that nobody indexed. The reason is structural, not a failure of record-keeping.

This page is about reconstructing officer information across time: what is possible, what is not, and how to write down what you found so that the dates travel with the names.

What to take away

Two ways a register holds time

The snapshot model. The California Secretary of State is one example. A corporation files a Statement of Information on Form SI-550 that lists its current officers. Each new statement replaces the officer list on the entity page. Earlier statements survive only as filed document images, if the office holds them for that year.

The event-log model. Companies House, the UK registrar of companies, records each director change as its own filing. An appointment is filed on Form AP01 and a termination on Form TM01. The officer page shows "appointed on" and "resigned on" dates taken from those filings. The Companies Act 2006 requires companies to notify these changes, which is why the log exists.

Knowing which model you are looking at decides your whole approach. Under the first, you are reading old documents. Under the second, you are reading a list of dated events and asking how far behind reality it ran.

Why the filing date is not always the event date

A register records what was filed, and filings follow deadlines and paperwork rather than events. A company may file a change days or weeks after it took effect.

On Companies House, a TM01 can carry a termination date that is earlier than its filing date. The form's date and the filing date are both on the record, and they can differ.

Read every date on an officer record as answering "when was this told to the office", unless the document itself states an effective date.

Reconstructing a year under the snapshot model

The result is not a year-by-year list. It is a series of dated observations with unknown intervals between them. Present it that way.

Reconstructing a year under the event-log model

Read the appointments and terminations as a list of ranges. For each person, the start is the AP01 filing date, or the effective date stated on it. The end is the TM01 date or, if there is none, "still recorded".

Then apply two corrections. A filing made long after the event may state an effective date inside the document that differs from the filing date. Use it when given, and note the lag.

A person with no termination filed may have left years ago. "Still recorded" means the company never filed the paperwork, not that the person is still there.

What turnover means, and what it does not

A roster that is stable across a decade of reports is a modest signal that the same people kept the company administratively active. It says nothing about competence or solvency.

A roster that changes completely between two reports is worth reading with the rest of the history. If it arrives with a name change, an agent change and a new address in the same window, a different business may have taken over an old registration. If the change arrives alone, the usual reasons are a sale, a succession or a founder stepping back.

A takeover of a registration is lawful and common. A company is a legal person in its own right, so the entity persists while the people attached to it change. Know this before you rely on the formation date.

Do not follow an individual from one company to the next across years. That turns a company check into a person check, which the register was not built for. Keep the question fixed on this entity in this period.

The dates that do not exist

Recording standard

Write each observation as a row: entity identifier and jurisdiction, name as written, title, the document it came from, and that document's filing date. The identifier is the entity number, because it is the one column that will still match in ten years.

If you inferred a range, mark the endpoints "filed" or "effective" so a reader knows which kind of date it is. When the register cannot answer a question about a year, write "no report filed for that period" rather than leaving the cell blank. An empty cell will be read as "nobody", which is the one thing it does not mean.

Common questions

Can I get an older report if the register only shows the current one?

Often yes, but not from the search page. Offices that keep document images list them separately from the entity summary. Ask the office what it holds for that entity and that year, and what it charges for copies. The fee schedule is on the office's website.

The company says someone resigned in 2018 but the register still shows them. Who is right?

Both can be. A resignation that was never filed, or was filed late, leaves the record unchanged. The register reports filings, so a stale name is evidence about the paperwork rather than about the person.

Is there any way to date a change more precisely than the two surrounding reports?

Not from the register alone. If the exact date matters, it has to come from the company: a resolution, a minute or a signed statement. The register can bound the change; it cannot place it.

Why does the roster restart after a reinstatement?

Because the reinstatement filing usually asks for current officers, and that answer replaces whatever stood before the lapse. The years inside the lapse produced no reports, so there is nothing on the record to overwrite.