How a Checkbase check works

What we check

A report runs the company through official public sources and brings the results together in one place. Every item in a report carries its source and its date. Sources we run:

• NZ Companies Register

  registration status, incorporation date, directors, shareholders, addresses and filing history

• NZ Gazette

  liquidation, receivership, administration and removal notices

• Companies Office filings

  annual-return compliance and receivership filing codes

• Courts, tribunals and NZ media

  court and regulator findings reported in official notices and established NZ outlets

• WorkSafe New Zealand

  concluded prosecution outcomes

• Commerce Commission case register

  case entries, shown with their status

• MBIE employment stand-down list

  employment-standards stand-downs

• Employment Relations Authority

  published determinations naming the company as a party

• International sanctions lists (MFAT and UN)

  name-similarity screening of directors, always labelled as unconfirmed identity

• Directors' other companies

  the register history of companies linked to the same directors

• Sector registers

  where relevant to the company's industry: FMA warnings, AML/CFT enforcement, product recalls, licensing registers

A report only claims a check it genuinely ran. If a source was not relevant or not reachable for a company, the report says so rather than implying coverage.

The matching rules

The fastest way to ruin a report is to attach the wrong company’s history to it. Our matching is deliberately strict, and we accept the cost of that strictness:

• 01Records attach by exact NZBN or exact registered name. Where a match is ambiguous, we leave it out. A miss is recoverable; a false attribution is not.
• 02Regulator findings attach to the company itself, never to a company merely connected through shared directors.
• 03An open investigation is not a finding. It appears with its status and does not move the meter.
• 04Sanctions screening is name-similarity only and is always labelled that way. We never assert identity from a name.
• 05Old items fade. Findings lose weight with age, and very old records no longer move the meter at all.

What the meter is, and is not

The meter counts what appears on the public record on the date shown, and how significant those records are. It is not a rating of anyone’s work, not a prediction, and not advice. An empty record is not an endorsement, and items on record are not proof of wrongdoing. The report leads with a plain-English line stating what the record shows, then lists every item with its source so you can read it yourself.

Corrections

Every data point in a report carries a flag control. If something looks wrong or missing, flag it; a person reviews each flag against the source record, and confirmed errors are corrected. The public record itself sometimes lags reality, which is why every report states its date and links to the live registers.

Independence

• ·We take no payment from the companies we report on, and a company cannot pay to change what its report says.
• ·We report the record as it stands. Removal of a page happens only through a lawful, documented process, never as a favour.
• ·We never rate workmanship or character. We state what the public record shows, dated and sourced, and leave the judgement to you.
• ·We do not sell personal data.

See it in practice

Browse the company directory, read this week’s business records, or run a check and read a report against the rules on this page.