Everyone dealing with a new company asks the very same questions: is this a legitimate and active company, and what is the actual identity of the person behind it? In the province of Ontario, the corporate registry in ON is used to answer these questions. The Ontario Business Registry was implemented by the Ontario Government in October 2021 as a new system for registering and searching for businesses and not-for-profit corporations.

Ontario Business Registry helps businesses to file all sorts of information related to their registration and incorporation, dissolution, and changes in the list of directors. In addition, the Ontario Business Registry acts as the public point of searching and checking the legitimacy of a company. Prior to the implementation of the registry, many procedures related to the search of companies' information were conducted using outdated services, making the process of checking the status of the company a little bit more complicated. Through the corporate registry in ON, it is possible to get basic information about a company, such as its activity status, its date of incorporation and its registered office.

For more thorough results, the Profile Report or other similar search products can reveal the present legal name, previous names of the corporation as well as information about directors and officers, except for their home addresses or email contacts. Such deep searches tend to be carried out by authorized search services rather than from the publicly free search system and often are utilized by lawyers, creditors and those who perform a due diligence process before some deal. The information about changes to the corporation’s name, if it happened recently, can be really important when checking documents and recovering a debt from such a company, because its old name might not be reflected in the public records anymore.

There are other kinds of businesses, apart from corporations, which can appear in the ON's Corporate Registry. For example, sole proprietorships and partnerships which work under their business names also appear in the corporate registry, but in a slightly different manner, depending on their kind of structure, and there is a corresponding type of report that should be obtained. It might be different to check the numbered company and the sole proprietorship registered in ON.

Companies that were either registered or incorporated prior to the establishment of the registry in 2021 have seen their records transferred into the database. Therefore, for the purposes of historical research, there are usually no problems with searching through the database, even for businesses that have been around for years. For anyone who is considering forming a partnership, making an important purchase or checking whether the company is a trustworthy supplier, the corporate registry will provide a quick way to tell the difference between a business that is properly registered and one that is just an imprint on a letterhead.

Olivier Thomas is the author of this article. To know more about land title in SK, Please visit our website: speedysearch.ca.