Australia (AU)

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Overview

ASIC registers various types of legal entities under the Corporations Act, ranging from companies to registered schemes and business names. How much company data a lookup returns depends heavily on the entity type involved, which is why entity type is covered before identifiers, search, and share data below. ASIC itself runs more than one register. Its companies register covers the proprietary companies, public companies, foreign companies, registered bodies, and registered schemes that make up the rest of this guide. A second, separate government body sits alongside ASIC: the Australian Business Register (ABR), operated by the Australian Taxation Office, not ASIC. The ABR issues Australian Business Numbers (ABNs) across a far wider range of entity types than ASIC’s companies register, see Entity Types below. Many companies hold both an ACN issued by ASIC and an ABN issued by the ABR, commonly registering for the ABN separately for GST or other tax purposes. The two identifiers come from two different bodies for the same company, which is part of why one should never be derived from the other, see Company Identifiers below. ASIC also operates the separate national Business Names Register. A business name is not a legal entity in its own right, so a business name search returns the person or organisation that holds the name, not a company profile. ASIC’s register, not the ABR’s thinner business-name lookup, is the source of record for who holds a name.

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Data Availability

For company-type entities (proprietary companies, public companies, foreign companies, and registered Australian bodies): Registered schemes and other registrations (business names, associations, charities, and similar) follow a different profile. See Entity Types for the breakdown.

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Entity Types

ASIC’s term for the people who own a stake in a company is member, not shareholder. For most companies the two are the same group: everyone who holds a share is a member. This guide uses “member” throughout because a few entity types have members without having any shares at all (see limited by guarantee below), so “member” is the term that covers both cases. Entity types outside ASIC’s companies register (business names, trusts, partnerships, sole traders, associations, and more) are administered by the ABR, which publishes its own entity type list covering that wider set. The distinction that matters most for planning an integration: proprietary companies are the only entity type with member-level detail at ASIC. * Not directly observed in our own data. This is ASIC’s own name for the type rather than a confirmed returned string. A shareholding result can come back empty for three different reasons, and they are not interchangeable:

• No members recorded. Public companies and registered schemes are not required to notify ASIC of membership changes, so ASIC never holds that detail to return.
• No share capital to hold. A company limited by guarantee has members but no shares, so there is no share register for ASIC, or anyone, to hold.
• Register held elsewhere. A foreign company’s member register stays with its home jurisdiction. ASIC’s Australian record does not include it.

ASIC has no public reference page equivalent to the ABR’s, so its own type, class, and subclass codes are set out here instead:

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Company Identifiers

Which identifier is primary depends on the entity type: Some entities, such as certain non-registered entities, are tracked internally by the registry under a number that is never returned in search or profile data. For these, the ABN is the identifier that is exposed and should be treated as primary.

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ABN and ACN are related, but not interchangeable

An ABN is often built from an existing ACN or ARBN plus two extra digits, so the two numbers can look related at a glance. That relationship does not hold consistently across every entity, so an ABN should never be derived from an ACN, or vice versa, by manipulating the digits. Always take each identifier from its own field.

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Search Behaviour

Name search and identifier search behave differently. Name search matches on the text supplied, so a number typed into the name search field is matched as a literal string rather than resolved to the entity it identifies. To resolve a number to an entity, use an identifier search instead. An identifier search can return more than the identifier that was searched on. Looking a company up by its ABN, for example, returns its ACN alongside it in the same result, since both identifiers belong to the one entity.

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Share and Member Data

As set out under Entity Types, only proprietary companies carry member-level detail at ASIC, and even there it is capped: ASIC keeps only the top twenty members of each share class, ranked by shareholding, plus any member tied with the twentieth. The twenty-member cap applies per share class, not per company, so a company with several classes can show far more than twenty holders in total. A class at exactly twenty may be silently truncated: nothing in the data indicates it, so treat such a class as potentially incomplete. A member’s shareholding record can also carry a beneficially held indicator alongside the holding percentage, both reflecting exactly what the company itself lodged with ASIC. Beneficially held means the registered holder receives the direct benefit of the shares. Where a holding is recorded as not beneficially held, the registered holder is holding on someone else’s behalf, and the register does not identify who that underlying beneficiary is. Each shareholding is also cross-referenced to the specific ASIC document the company lodged to record it. Ordering that document confirms exactly what was submitted, useful where a recorded percentage or status looks inconsistent, but it will not reveal a beneficiary that was never lodged. The register records what the company lodged, and the beneficiary’s identity is not part of what is lodged: establishing who ultimately benefits from a holding that is not beneficially held is not a question the register, or any service that relays it, can answer.

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Known Limitations

• Registered schemes never carry an Australian Business Number. ASIC does not record an ABN against a registered scheme, regardless of when it was registered.
• A business name’s Australian Business Number belongs to the entity holding the name, not the business name itself. Business names are trading names rather than legal entities: where an ABN is present against a business name record, it identifies the underlying legal entity, and the same ABN can appear against more than one business name held by that entity.