Utah Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Utah makes it relatively simple to look up business information through the website of the Secretary of State. Below well 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. Its absolutely critical when performing due diligence and for Know Your Client (KYC) purposes. If youre only performing these kinds of searches occasionally, Utahs search portal allows you to find the information youre looking for quickly and easily. 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 Business Search portal linked above. The landing page looks like this:

The search interface is simple and basic. Using the tabs at the top, you can look up any business by name or its Entity Number. You can also search by an Executive Name, but that will cost you $3.00. There is no way to limit your results to records that begin with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term, or to only companies that are still active.

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

The results are delivered 50 at a time, and are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.

On the results page, youll see each companys name, its status (active, dissolved, etc.), Type (legal structure), the city in which its located, and a button to see the details.

Clicking on the name or Details button for any of the records will bring you to the details page for that business. Those pages look like this:

Theres more information here about the business, including its full mailing address, its state of origin (if not Utah), and the name and address of the Registered Agent (including a helpful link to find other companies for which they are an Agent).

Further down the page you can see the date the company was initially registered, and the dates of its last and next renewal.

The buttons on the right suggest that you might be able to access more information, and you can, but it comes at a cost: $1.00 to view the management team, $2.00 for each filed document that you want to download as a PDF, and $12.00 for a Certificate of Existence. In short, what you see on the details page is what you get.

One minor frustration: if you click through to any of the additional purchase pages, like this one …

… and then click the back button to return to the details page, all the fields are empty. You have to then go back to the search results page then click through to the business to see the information again.

Utah offers a minimal amount of business information at no cost, and their search functionality is limited by the lack of filters. 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.