Verify an Indian company from public records in 4 checks

What public records can and cannot tell you

India publishes a good deal about its companies. The Ministry of Corporate Affairs keeps master data for every company and LLP, the GST portal confirms tax registrations, sector regulators publish licences and notices, and insolvency and court records are open to search. Together they answer the first questions anyone should ask before working with or investing in a company: does it exist, is it active, is it keeping up with its filings, and is anything serious pending against it.

They cannot tell you everything. A record shows what was filed or issued, on the date it was filed or issued. It does not show whether the company is trading well today or what happened after the last update. A registration is not proof that a business operates, and an empty search is not proof that nothing exists, only that nothing turned up where you looked.

This guide sets out four checks you can run on any Indian company from public records, in the order that saves the most time. Each one ends with a note of what to keep, so the result can be checked by someone else.

Check one: identity and status on the corporate affairs master data

Confirm the company exists and is active before anything else, because every later check depends on having the right entity. Search the Ministry of Corporate Affairs master data by name or, better, by Corporate Identity Number. The master data shows the registered name, the CIN, the date of incorporation, the registered office address, the class and category of company, its authorised and paid-up capital, and its current status.

Read the status carefully. Active means the company is on the books; struck off, under process of striking off, amalgamated, dissolved and under liquidation each mean something different, and none of them describes a company you can sign a new contract with in the ordinary way. Check the name history too: a company that changed its name will show its former names, which helps when older documents use a name you cannot find.

If you started from a brand rather than a company, first work through matching a brand to its registered company. Searching on a brand name alone is the most common way to end up checking the wrong entity.

• The CIN and the registered name, exactly as the ministry spells them.
• The status and the date you read it.

Check two: the filing history

A company that files on time is at least being administered, and a company that has stopped filing often has stopped trading. The master data shows the dates of the last annual general meeting and the last balance sheet filed. Compare them with today's date: a gap of several years is a strong signal to ask questions before going further.

For more detail, the ministry's document view lets you read filed financial statements and annual returns for a fee. The annual return shows shareholding and changes in capital, and the financial statements show revenue and profit as the company reported them. Remember that these are the company's own figures, filed some months after the year they describe, so cite them with the financial year they cover and the date they were filed.

The master data also lists the company's directors and their Director Identification Numbers. These are public records of who holds office. Use them to understand the company's control and its links to other companies, and keep to what the record shows: a director's public appointment, not personal contact details.

Check three: tax registration and sector licences

A company that sells goods or services in India above the threshold needs a GST registration, and its status is public. Search the GSTIN on the GST portal's taxpayer search to see the legal name, the trade name, the state, the date of registration and whether the registration is active, suspended or cancelled. A cancelled registration for a company that claims to be selling is worth a question.

Many sectors need a licence on top of company registration, and the issuing body usually publishes it. Food businesses hold food safety licences, and lenders and payment companies appear on the central bank's lists of regulated entities. Check the licence that the company's activity requires, and record its validity dates beside the issuing authority.

• The GSTIN, its status and the trade name registered against it.
• The sector licence the activity needs, with its issuing authority and validity.

Check four: notices, insolvency and disputes

The last check looks for anything serious on the record. Insolvency proceedings in India are published: the insolvency regulator's site carries public announcements for companies admitted to a resolution process, and the National Company Law Tribunal publishes its orders. Search both by the company's registered name and its CIN.

Regulators publish notices and orders too. The securities regulator publishes orders against listed companies and intermediaries, and drug and food regulators publish alerts on products and their makers. For listed companies, stock exchange filings add results and disclosures of material events. Court records can be searched on the national courts portal, though the results need care: a case naming a similar company is not a case against yours.

Treat what you find as a lead to read, not a verdict. Open the original document and note who issued it and on what date, with the outcome where one is published. A notice that was later withdrawn or settled tells a different story from one that is open.

Keeping the result so it can be checked again

The value of this work is in the record you leave. Keep one row per check with the source, the fact found, the date of the document and the date you read it. A collected date is not a publication date, and a reader needs both to judge how current the picture is. Where a search found nothing, write down where you searched and when, since the absence is only as good as the search.

Plan to repeat the identity and status check before any decision that depends on it. Company status and licences both change, and the record you made last quarter describes last quarter. The guide on checking a startup funding round applies the same discipline to funding claims, and the guide on checking a dataset's coverage and freshness covers what to ask of any dataset you use for this work.

Public records and company data in Rewalto

Rewalto's public records data finds the relevant fields in filings, registers and official notices and keeps the original source beside every result, including its issuing authority and publication date. Its company data brings organisation identity and web presence into one record with dated evidence. Check current availability in the catalogue before you plan around either, and review the original document for anything authoritative.

For startups and their backers, see the startup data and investor data pages. The company and startup data overview explains how the pieces connect.

Common questions