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Wednesday, 21 May 2014

Links to help identify Legal Entities


Following on from my piece regarding the importance of correctly identifying your Grantor on the PPSR - see here - I undertook to post some links and hints to make this task a little easier.

ASIC should probably be your first port of call.



This link helps identify whether organisations have ACNs. 





Choose “Organisation & Business Names” from the drop down box and enter the name of the business you are looking for.  You’ll probably get a list of matches from which you can choose the one that matches your customer precisely.

Any Australian businesses with PTY or PTY LTD at the end of their name must be registered here.

Most businesses with LTD at the end of their name are likely to be here although some state registered businesses may not be.

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Where all you have is a trading name, this link is useful for identifying who owns that trading name.





Choose “Business names index” from the drop down box and enter the trading name for the business you are looking for.  If we enter “Haymans” for example, we will find on the second page of search results the following match:





Clicking on that entry will give you the following:





Showing that, in this example, the legal entity behind the trading name is Metal Manufactures Limited.  

Unfortunately, business names are registered against ABNs and do not show ACNs but, in this instance, clicking on the ‘Metal Manufactures Limited’ name will take you to a screen identifying the organisation’s ACN (as well as other trading names registered to them):




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This link will take you to the Government’s ABN Lookup service. 


While it will certainly confirm to whom an ABN is registered it won’t identify who is acting as the legal entity should the ABN belong to a Trust. It will often show trading names used by the ABN holder (not always reliably however) which can then be used to perform a separate look-up as per the previous link provided above.

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