Mississippi Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Mississippi makes it relatively simple to look up business information 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, Mississippi'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 business search page linked above. If you scroll down past the charming and inviting links in the header - 'Y'all Business', and 'Y'all Vote' - the search interface looks like this:

The search interface is simple and basic. Using the tabs at the top, you can look up any business by name, by the Business ID, or by the name of an Officer or Registered Agent for the company.

Using the radio buttons, you can limit your results to records that start with, or have any or all words in your search term, or results that sound like the search term.

When you perform the search, you'll be directed to the results page, which looks like this:

The results are delivered ten to a page, sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You can reverse the sort order (A-Z to Z-A), or sort the results by another field, by clicking on the header for that column.

Since there's no option on the search interface to filter by the company's status, results include active and inactive companies alike (of course, you can sort the results so all active companies are at the top).

On the results page, you'll see each company's name and Business ID, the type of business (its legal structure), its status, and the date it was created.

Clicking on the 'Details' button for any of the records opens a small window in the middle of the screen, like so:

Here you can view more information about the business, beyond what was displayed on the results page. That includes the date of incorporation and the state in which that was done, the principal office address, and the name and contact information for the Registered Agent, and Officers and Directors. Helpfully, those peoples' names are linked, allowing you to quickly and easily cross-reference other companies for which they have those roles.

At the top of the window, you can choose to opt in or out of email updates related to the business (which, incidentally, doesn't require you to create an account). You can also print the business details by clicking that option.

Clicking 'View Filed Documents' opens this window:

Clicking on 'View Image' brings up a scan of the document in question which you can view, save, or print.

Mississippi offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost, and their search interface makes the process relatively smooth and simple for each search. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, 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.