Arizona Secretary of State Business Search

Arizona makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the Office of the Secretary of State's Corporation Commission. Below we'll walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are any number of reasons you might need this information. It's absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, the Arizona search portal allows you to find the data you're looking for quickly and easily. If you're searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools you'll want to know about, but we'll come back to that in just a moment.

The search portal is a bit tricky to find if you navigate from the home page of the Arizona Secretary of State, but you can find a link to the Arizona Corporation Commission above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is clean and simple. You can search by the company name, the name of a Statutory Agent or a Principal, or by the Entity ID number if you know it. For each of these, you can choose to search for results that start with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term.

Helpfully, the search page also offers you advanced search options right off the hop. You can limit your results by:

• Entity Type: You can choose to search for either a domestic (formed in Arizona) or foreign (formed in another state or country) company.

• Entity Status: You can limit your results to either Active or Inactive companies, or both.

• Name Type: Here you'll find options including True Name, Former Name, Reserved Name, and more.

• County: You can choose to view only results from a specific county in Arizona.

If your search returns more than 500 results, the page will generate an error and ask you to limit your search with additional criteria.

Searching for only active companies starting with 'acme', generates 232 results, and the results page looks like this:

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order.The headers don't allow you to change the sort order. For each of the search results, you can view the company's Entity ID, the Entity Name, the Entity Type, the County in which it's located, the Agent Name and Type, and the Entity Status (which is 'Active' in all these cases since we limited the search to those).

You might notice a few odd things about the results right away. The search disregards any spaces or additional punctuation, seeing 'A.C.M. Electrical' as a match. Also, the very first result - A and W Disposal Service - seems at first glance to be out of place. Let's dig into the record a bit further to see why.

Clicking on the company name takes you to the business details page.

Here you can view more detailed information about the business, including names of the principals and mailing addresses, filing dates, the state in which they were formed (in the case of a foreign entity like this one), and more.

At the bottom of the screen, the blue buttons give you more options. You can view the company's Document History (filings, annual reports, etc.), Pending Documents (if there are any), Microfilm History, and the Name and Restructuring History. Clicking on the latter button shows us that A and W Disposal Service was merged from Acme Scavenger Service in 1998, explaining why it was returned as a search result.

Clicking the 'Print' button at the bottom right of any of the additional detail screens will generate a print copy of all of the information available for that business, including scanned documents. In this case, for example, there would be 109 pages to print.

Arizona offers a generous amount of business information at no cost, and with relatively advanced search functionality. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, however, this would quickly consume a lot of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.