When corporate groups go into stealth mode and refuse to share information with the public about their political activities, a good way to figure out at least a little bit of what’s going down is to look at those corporations’ filings at the state level. In order to do business in a state, corporations have to register with the Secretary of State (or its equivalent office: a Board of Elections or Public Resource Commission) in a state. Those registrations contain sometimes-useful information: the corporation’s statement of purpose is occasionally printed, and if not, then the section of IRS code under which a corporation is organized is printed, which can tell you a bit about the corporation’s purpose or limitation. Corporate officers are named, a corporate business and/or mailing address is listed, and dates of incorporation or change in a corporate charter are also sometimes listed.
In the abstract, this information is available to the public. Every state and the District of Columbia has at the least an online Corporate Name Search utility that you can find by typing “[State Name] Corporation Search” as a query in your favorite search engine. But practically speaking, useful information is often stuck somewhere in a cabinet in an office that you can’t find, or made available only through the mail with a 5-10 day processing period, or placed behind a “fee wall” so that you have to pay money to obtain a pdf file with basic information.
Knowing which states share information expansively, and which states hoard it, can help you to avoid frustration and be more efficient in your own information gathering exercises. That’s why I’ve prepared this state-by-state report card, categorizing DC and the Nifty Fifty according to information transparency and ease of access.
A+: States that Go Above and Beyond to Provide Corporate Information
These states not only make corporate filings available for download online at no cost, but provide more of that information than other states, including verbose descriptions of filing amendments. One of these states even pushes transparency a bit too far, sharing information about corporate officers’ home addresses. Florida’s corporate name search engine does a good job of offering results for corporations whose spellings closely but not exactly match the name you type in to a search bar:
Alaska
Florida
Ohio
Rhode Island
A: States that Share All Available Filings Online with No Fee
Colorado
Georgia
Idaho
Indiana
Iowa
Kentucky
Maryland
Massachusetts
Mississippi
Missouri
Michigan
North Carolina
New Hampshire
South Dakota
Wyoming
A-: Go to Staples and Get a New Scanner, Ken Bennett
Arizona shares all corporate filings online as pdf files without charging any money for access. That’s nice. But those pdfs are scanned in using what must be a 15 year-old scanner, and the results are largely illegible. No, really:
So come on, Secretary of State Bennett. Take that trip to Staples. You can pass a jar around for a collection, even. With this fix your service will be keen.
C: States that charge the public fees to obtain filings online
Yes, it’s a steep grading curve, but really. The states below already charge the corporations a fee to receive, process and file the documents they receive, but that isn’t enough for them: they have to go ahead and charge a fee — ranging from $1 to above $50 per file — for the public to download a pdf. The actual cost per download is insubstantial and besides, the state is not the owner of this information: the public is the owner of this information. The effect of these fees is to erect a barrier so that only people and corporations with money to burn will bother to dig up the details on corporations. How elitist.
Delaware
Hawaii
Louisiana
Maine
Minnesota
Montana
Nebraska
Nevada
Oklahoma
Oregon
Utah
Washington
West Virginia
Wisconsin
C-: and it exploded
Pennsylvania charges fees for public documents, but it apparently doesn’t use the money to pay an IT guy to keep the system working. In 7 out of 10 attempts I made to access the PA corporate database (on two different browsers), the system crashed and I had to start over.
D: Filings not available for download online, fee required to obtain by mail:
Mail? Hello. This is the 21st Century. Factor in mailing times and processing periods and you could wait a month to get the document you’re looking for, and yes, you’ll have to pay for the privilege. Does someone want the little people not to bother?
That blanket condemnation is not completely fair in all cases. New York State will let someone print out the file you want on the same day your request comes in and send it back out to you… for only $150.
Alabama
Arkansas
California
Connecticut
DC
Illinois
Kansas
New Jersey
New Mexico
New York
North Dakota
South Carolina
Tennessee
Vermont
Virginia
F: A fee just to search for the name of a corporation
That would be Texas, which apparently is a very small state after all.
