Secretary of state search: which index answers which question

"Searching the secretary of state" sounds like one action. It is not. A state filing office is a custodian of several separate indexes, each holding a different kind of document and answering a different question. Searching the wrong one is the most common reason a lookup comes back empty for a business that plainly exists.

This page is a directory of the indexes: what each holds, what a hit in it proves, and which questions it cannot touch.

What to take away

The indexes a state filing office commonly holds

Which of these sits with the state filing office rather than another agency or a county varies by jurisdiction. Treat the list as the set of things to look for, not as a description of any particular state.

The entity register. Corporations, LLCs, partnerships, and nonprofits formed in the state, plus out-of-state entities registered to do business there. Formation documents, amendments, periodic reports, status, and the entity identifier. This is what people mean by "the business search", and it is the right index for the questions in a company verification routine.

Assumed names. Trade names, DBAs, and fictitious names: the register of businesses operating under a name that is not their legal one, a category the Legal Information Institute defines under fictitious business name. In some states this sits with the filing office; in others with a county clerk; in others it is not required for certain entity types at all. It is the most commonly missed index, and the next section explains why.

Financing statements. Filings recording that a lender or supplier has claimed a security interest in a business's assets. Often maintained by the same office, always searched separately. A hit tells you somebody has a claim on collateral; it does not tell you the amount outstanding, and a stale filing may sit there long after the debt is repaid.

State trademark and service mark registrations. Separate from federal registration and much narrower in effect; the USPTO's own note on what a trademark protects is the quickest way to see where the two systems sit relative to each other. Relevant if you are checking a name for use, largely irrelevant to verifying a counterparty.

Notaries, apostilles, and authentications. Present at most offices, rarely part of a verification exercise, occasionally the reason someone is on the site in the first place.

Some form of certificate service. Where you order a certificate of good standing or existence, and copies of filed documents.

Where the indexes actually sit: three states

Each office prints the same idea in its own field — Delaware's file number, California's entity number, New York's DOS ID — and the search box generally takes either a name or that number, with the number the more reliable of the two.

Fees are not part of any register. Certificates of good standing or existence, document copies, and apostilles are priced per document on each office's published fee schedule, so check the office's fee page before you order.

The gap that makes searches fail: trading names

Three different strings can refer to the same business, and only one of them is in the entity register:

An entity-name search finds only the first. So a business trading as something else is invisible to it, no matter how carefully you spell the query. This is why perfectly real companies "don't exist" in a search, and why the fix is almost never a better search of the same index.

What to do about it, in order:

The absence of an assumed-name registration is worth noting rather than alarming. Requirements differ, and plenty of businesses trade under an unregistered brand without any intent to obscure anything.

Matching questions to indexes

The bottom three rows are where most misplaced confidence comes from. A clean result in the entity register gets read as a clean result generally, when the office holds no information about any of those subjects.

The three rows the entity register cannot answer point somewhere else, and none of them is the filing office. Licensing: the state's professional licensing boards, such as the boards under California's Department of Consumer Affairs or the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation. Tax: the state revenue department — California's Franchise Tax Board, New York's Department of Taxation and Finance — and the Internal Revenue Service for federal liens. Litigation: the courts' own records, PACER for federal cases and the state trial court's case search for state cases. A clean entity register hit in California therefore says nothing about a contractor's license, a Franchise Tax Board balance, or a suit in the county superior court.

A search routine that fails informatively

"Not found" is evidence only when it names what was searched. Without that, it is just a shrug in a file.

Before you conclude

Note the office you used and the exact address you reached it at, the indexes you searched, the queries you ran, and the date. Capture the entity identifier the moment you have a match and use it for every subsequent lookup, because it is the only field that will still be reliable when the name changes.

The broader question of getting to the right office — Delaware's Division of Corporations, California's Secretary of State business search, New York's Department of State — and of telling those offices apart from the commercial sites that sell copies of their records, is covered in the secretary of state search overview and in state entity directories.

Common questions

How do I know which index the search box is actually querying?

Read the office's search help page once for that state. Several offices run more than one index behind a single field and pick for you, and a nil result means nothing until you know which one answered.

The assumed-name index is at a county. Which county?

Usually the one where the business operates, and sometimes more than one. Ask the office or the counterparty rather than guessing, because searching the wrong county produces the same empty result as searching nothing.

A financing statement is on file. Should I walk away?

No. Secured lending is ordinary, the filing shows a claim rather than a balance, and stale filings sit there long after debts are repaid. It is a question for the counterparty, not a finding.

I found the trading name but it points at a different company. Now what?

Stop and establish which legal entity is on your contract before anything else. This is the single most valuable thing this whole exercise produces, and it is worth a direct conversation rather than more searching.

Do I need to search every index every time?

No. For most checks the entity register and its status are the whole job. The rest of the list earns its time when the exposure is large or when the entity register has come back empty.