Company status and deregistration

A company's status on the ASIC register tells you whether it legally exists and whether anything is happening to it. "Registered" means the company is alive and can trade. "Strike-off action in progress" means ASIC has started to deregister it, usually for unpaid fees or a voluntary application. "Deregistered" means it has ceased to exist as a legal person. "Under external administration and/or controller appointed" means a liquidator, administrator, receiver or similar has been appointed. asicapi returns the status as a { code, label } object on every company and search result so you can act on the code rather than parse the label.

Status codes

The register also holds business names, associations, trusts and schemes, so the status table is wider than the four company states. The full table:

The codes fall into groups:

The company lifecycle

{
  "status": { "code": "DRGD", "label": "Deregistered" },
  "deregistration": {
    "date": "2019-02-11",
    "reason": { "code": "S601AB", "label": "SECTION 601AB" }
  }
}

Name searches exclude deregistered companies by default. Pass includeDeregistered=true (or a scope that includes them, such as companies or everything-current-and-deregistered) to see them. Deregistered companies keep their full historical extract, so GET /v1/companies/{id} still returns the company object and a historical extract can still be purchased with POST /v1/companies/{id}/extracts for a company that ceased to exist decades ago.

External administration (EXAD)

EXAD is displayed by ASIC as ** Under External Administration And/Or Controller Appointed **. It replaces REGD while an external administrator holds office. The company still exists and is still registered; the status is a warning that control has passed from the directors to an appointee. The kinds of appointment, and the office holder roles they produce, include:

When status is EXAD, ASIC adds an external administration documents section to the company extract. asicapi returns it in the externalAdministration key of a purchased extract and exposes the appointees and those documents through /external-administration, which reads the extract you hold. ASIC notes that this section may not list every document relating to the status and that state and territory records should also be searched. Newly commenced administrations are published each week in the external-administrations weekly summary.

Cancellation versus deregistration date

deregistration.date is labelled "Date Deregistered" on an ASIC extract. When the status is CNCL (Cancelled), ASIC labels the same date "Date Cancelled". Cancellation applies where ASIC cancels a registration rather than deregistering a company, most commonly for foreign companies and registered Australian bodies that cease to carry on business in Australia. Treat the date the same way in code but change the label you show.

Deregistration reasons

The reason is the section of the Corporations Act 2001, or of an earlier Companies Code, under which the company was removed. Deregistrations since 1991 are reliably coded; for older migrated records the code may be absent, and ASIC's guidance is to show simply "deregistered". The full table:

The reasons you will meet most often:

Business name and scheme statuses

Business names do not go through strike-off. A business name is REGD while its registration is current, REXP once the renewal date passes without payment, RMVD when the holder cancels it or ASIC removes it, and ARCH once the record is archived and the name becomes available again. The reviewDate on a business name is its renewal date.

Registered managed investment schemes are PEND while an application is being processed, REGD once registered, WDUP (or WDPI for prescribed interest schemes) while being wound up, and DRGD once deregistered.

Using status in the API

The status appears on the company object, on the company summary embedded in search results and person roles, and on every weekly summary item. The deregistration object is null unless the status is DRGD or CNCL. Filter search results to live companies with the registered-companies scope, or include everything with includeDeregistered=true. Because ASIC adds codes without notice, handle unknown codes gracefully: asicapi sets label equal to the code when the code is not in its table.

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