Texas Secretary of State Business Search

In Texas, the process for looking up business information through the office of the Secretary of State is simple, but the tradeoff is that youll have to dig a bit to find the information you need. Below well walk through the steps for doing this, and show you some additional resources you might not know about.

There are a number of reasons you might need this information. Its absolutely critical when performing due diligence and Know Your Client (KYC) purposes when youre onboarding new customers.. If youre only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Texass search portal allows you to find the data youre looking for. It just takes a bit of time and effort. If youre searching records like these in high numbers, there are some tools youll want to know about, but well come back to that in just a moment.

You can find the Taxable Entity Search on the page of the Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, linked above. The landing page looks like this:

You can search by Tax ID number or File Number if you know it, or by name. Every time you perform a search, youll need to click the Im Not a Robot button. Thankfully, it doesnt usually require you to perform any other verification; clicking the box is enough.

If you perform a search that returns too many records (over 500, I believe), youll need to refine the search further.

This brings me to the first complaint I have about this page; theres no advanced search function. You cant filter by additional criteria, you can only change the search parameters. When youve narrowed the parameters enough, your search results are returned, like so.

This brings me to the second irritation I have with Texass search function: as you can see, theres very little information on the search results page - only the name, Tax ID number, and the zip code. To see anything else about a business, you have to click the details button on the left. When you do, a window pops up with more details, and a button to print it if you wish.

In this window, youll find the companys mailing address, the state that the business was formed in, the date the business was registered with the Secretary of State and the SoS file number, the name of the registered agent, and the address of the registered office (which is not always the same as the mailing address for the business itself).

You can also see the company's current status with respect to their right to transact business in Texas. There are six possible statuses, and if you're not sure what one means, you can find their definitions by clicking on the little question mark.

Lastly, if you click on the Public Information Report tab at the top of the window, youll see some additional information - specifically, contact information for the people listed as directors and members of the company.

As you can see, searching for an individual business in Texas can be time consuming, with a lot of individual clicks required to get to the information you need. If you need to search for hundreds - or even thousands - of these records each month, though, this task could quickly consume a great deal of time. Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.