Vermont Secretary of State Business Search

The state of Vermont 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, Vermonts 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 Corporations Divisions search page linked above. The landing page looks like this:

There are a wealth of choices offered to filter your search. You can search by the business name, limiting your results to companies that start with, contain, or are an exact match for your search term. You can also include names that sound like your term.

In the Express Search options at the top, you can also choose to search for businesses by Business ID, Filing Number (not the file number, but a document filed with the office), or by previous names for the business.

Among the Advanced Search options, you can limit your results by the Registration Type (lots of options here, including LLCs, LLPs, non-profit and for-profit corporations, etc.), the current status of the entity (active, revoked, withdrawn, etc.), names of the Registered Agent or Principal (including sound alike options), and even by the NAICS codes of the business.

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

The results are sorted by company name in alphabetical order. You cannot reverse the default order, or sort by another field.

Theres a generous amount of information on the results page. For each business name, you can see its Business ID, its type, the principal address for the business, and the name of its Registered Agent. The month in which the companys fiscal year begins is also shown, as is the current status of the business (all active here, since the search was limited to those results).

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

Much of the information here is repeated from the results page. In addition, you can review the home jurisdiction of the business (if its based elsewhere, as in this example), important filing dates for the business, and contact information for the Principals and Registered Agent for the business.

At the bottom of the page youll find four navigation buttons for additional information.

The Name History and Shares buttons will only display that information where its available (and it often isnt).

Clicking on the Filing History button displays a list of filed documents, which you can click to download:

One final note: the site is very sensitive to traffic. If youre clicking rapidly between screens trying to find the information youre looking for, youll likely find your IP address blocked as suspected malicious traffic. The speeding ticket looks like this:

Vermont 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 (not to mention the fact that your IP address would likely be blocked). Furthermore, Secretary of State data is different from one state to another, so combining and integrating data from multiple states is complex.