Maine Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Maine allows you to look up information about businesses registered there through the website of the Secretary of State. 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 for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If you're only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Maine's search portal allows you to find the information 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.

You can find the Corporate Name Search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is rudimentary, offering the option to search only by name or by Charter number. The limits on search filtering could become quite frustrating, because the site will only deliver 100 results at a time.

There's a bit of assistance offered, in the form of 'Search tips and key to abbreviations' (https://icrs.informe.org/nei-sos-icrs/ICRS?Info). Limiting your search parameters is far from intuitive, however. From the site:

Example:

• To search for Acme Company, Inc.

• exact text search: Acme Company, Inc.

• keyword with wildcard (%): %acme%

• partial keyword with wild card (%): %acm%

It's not entirely clear if those wildcard functions do anything, because when performing a search for the keyword 'acme' (with no wildcards), the results page looks like this:

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field. The information offered here is limited, to say the least. Here, you can only see the name of the business, and the type of name it is - the legal name, an assumed name or former name, or a trade mark.

Clicking on the 'Information Summary' link for any of the records will bring you to the corresponding page for that business. Those pages look like this:

There's a little more information on this page. You can access the business's Charter number, the status of the name (active, inactive, or otherwise), the initial filing date, and the name and contact information for the Clerk or Registered Agent for the business.

The only other option on this page, to access more information, is to click the link at the bottom of the screen:

If you need certified copies, you can purchase them directly. Or, you can click 'View list of filings', which will bring you to this page:

There are no previews here; for any additional information, you must order the document at a cost of $3 each.

Maine offers a limited amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface is rudimentary. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, this would quickly consume a lot of time (and potentially get quite costly). Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.