New Mexico Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Missouri 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, Missouri'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.

One interesting note: New Mexico is one of a very small number of states that block traffic from IP addresses from outside the United States. While this is one way to mitigate the risk of malicious traffic, it's a crude and clumsy way of doing so.

That said, assuming you're accessing the site from a US-based IP address, you can find the main search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

From this page, you can choose to perform a number of different searches. If you choose to search for a business name, the search interface looks like this:

The search interface is very basic. The only option for limiting your search results is using the radio buttons to search for businesses that 'start with', are an 'exact match' or 'contain' your search term.

The captcha at the bottom of the screen must be completed before the search is conducted. And clicking the box isn't good enough - you have to complete the 'click the picture' challenge before you proceed.

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

The results are delivered ten at a time, and they're sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.

On the results page, you'll see each company's name (and any 'Doing Business As' names), the Business ID number, the entity type (its legal structure), its state of incorporation, its current status, and the date of expiration (when there is one).

Clicking on the name for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages are arranged as a series of tiles. Let's look at them from top to bottom.

Starting at the top, you'll see the basic information about the business:

The entity details and entity type (repeated from the results page) are first. This is followed by the formation date and reporting information. You'll find that many of the fields are either blank or marked 'Not Applicable' - this was true of more than a few sample companies I viewed.

Here you can view more information about the business, including names of the Governing Person (or persons), mailing and location addresses, important dates such as their renewal month and the due date for their Annual Report, the state in which they were formed, and more.

Scrolling further down the page, you'll see these tiles:

Contact information for the business, and for the Registered Agent are available here. If you're curious about 'Outstanding Items', these display times in which the business fell behind in its filings. Here's a sample from a different business profile:

Scrolling down further, you'll see spaces where Director, Officer, and Manager information would be displayed, if it is applicable:

And finally, near the bottom of the page:

The Members and Organizers of the company are listed here, along with the Incorporators and Trustees.

You'll also find the company's Filing History here (initially the tile is displayed collapsed). Clicking on any of the filings displayed opens a window where the filing will appear if it's available for viewing online (this one wasn't).

New Mexico offers a reasonable amount of business information at no cost. The search functionality is limited, however, and the captcha requirement for each search is cumbersome. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, 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.