Types of company office holders in Australia

An office holder is a person or organisation that holds a formal position in relation to an Australian company and whose appointment must be notified to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) under the Corporations Act 2001. The everyday examples are the directors and the company secretary, but the register also records auditors, liquidators, administrators, receivers, controllers and the responsible entity of a managed investment scheme. Whenever someone orders a company extract by ACN, the office holder section is usually the first thing they read, because it answers the question "who is running, auditing or winding up this company right now, and who did before?"

What ASIC records about each office holder

For every office holder ASIC keeps a small, consistent set of facts. The API exposes them on the officeholder object in the officeholders section of a company extract, which you purchase once with POST /v1/companies/{id}/extracts and then read for free through GET /v1/companies/{id}/officeholders. See purchasing for the fee model.

Current extracts contain current office holders only. Ceased office holders are part of the historical extract ("type": "historical" on the purchase), and the office holders endpoint exposes them through status=former or status=all. If you hold only a current extract and ask for ceased records, the endpoint returns extract_required (HTTP 402) with a historical purchase suggestion instead of buying one for you.

The 37 office holder roles

ASIC's office holder role table (the office holder roles table) has 37 entries. They are easier to understand in groups. The full unfiltered list is on the office holder roles reference page.

Management and governance

Auditors

Liquidation and winding up

Administration and restructuring

Receivers and controllers

Managed investment scheme roles

How ASIC orders office holders

ASIC returns office holder records in a fixed role sequence rather than alphabetically. The order is RG, RP, PA, RO, RN, CA, EO, DR, SR, LD, AA, AG, UH, RC, RM, PT, PQ, MQ, VQ, CQ, SM, CM, DM, OM, AQ, RF, RS, FE, CR, MC, AC, AD, BI, BM, BP. Within each role, current records come first, followed by ceased records in reverse chronological order of ceasing. The API preserves this order, so the first director in the list is a current director and the last is the one who left longest ago. The first four codes in the sequence are address types, which ASIC sorts alongside roles on a printed extract; they never appear as role values.

People and organisations as office holders

Most office holders are natural persons identified by name and birth details, but several roles are held by organisations. An ultimate holding company, a responsible entity, a local agent and a trustee are companies, and a receiver or administrator may be recorded as a firm. The party.type field tells you which you have:

{
  "object": "officeholder",
  "role": { "code": "DR", "label": "Director" },
  "status": { "code": "C", "label": "Current" },
  "appointedAt": "2015-02-01",
  "ceasedAt": null,
  "party": {
    "type": "person",
    "person": { "familyName": "SMITH", "givenNames": ["JANE", "LOUISE"], "formatted": "JANE LOUISE SMITH" },
    "birth": { "date": "1975-04-03", "locality": "MELBOURNE", "stateOrCountry": "VIC" },
    "organisation": null
  },
  "address": { "careOf": null, "line1": null, "street": "12 EXAMPLE STREET", "locality": "MELBOURNE", "state": "VIC", "postcode": "3000", "country": "AUSTRALIA" },
  "sourceDocument": { "documentNumber": "0E5123456", "qualifier": null },
  "cessationDocuments": [],
  "court": null
}

Secretaries are optional for proprietary companies

Since the Corporate Law Economic Reform Program Act 1999, a proprietary company is not required to appoint a secretary. When a company has no SR record, ASIC's printed extract carries the note: "Appointment of secretary is optional. In the event no secretary is appointed the director(s) assume the responsibilities under the Law." An empty result for role[]=SR is therefore normal for a small company and does not indicate missing data.

Director cessation documents and court orders

A director's ceased record can carry up to nine cessationDocuments, each with a document number, received date, form code, page count and a description when the document is a court document. When a court order affects a role, the court object gives the court type (Federal, Family or Supreme), the state, the application number and the year. See directors and secretaries for the Form 484 and Form 370 notifications that create these records.

Filtering office holders

curl "https://api.asicapi.dev/v1/companies/004085616/officeholders?status=all&role[]=DR&role[]=SR" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ASICAPI_KEY"

status accepts current (default), former or all. role[] accepts any code from the table above and may be repeated. The endpoint reads the most recent extract you hold for the company and is free; former office holders require that extract to be historical. The response carries an extract reference with the id, type and asOf time of the snapshot it was read from, and meta.billable is false.

The same appointment from the person's side

Every office holder record also exists on ASIC's person index. After a free people search, purchase a person extract with POST /v1/people/extracts, then GET /v1/people/{personId}/roles lists every company in which that person holds or held a role, with the same role codes and a company summary on each row. This is how you check a director across all their companies rather than one company at a time.

Roles held by companies and roles on registers

Two neighbouring code tables use overlapping codes. Roles a company holds in other companies (the company roles table) are AG local agent, DR director, TM trust management company, TR trustee, UH ultimate holding company and RN responsible entity; they appear in rolesHeld on GET /v1/companies/{id}/relationships, which reads a purchased relational extract. Officer roles shown on the professional registers (the register officer roles table) are DR, EO, SR, AA, FE member of a futures exchange, RN, TN and CA; they appear as officeRoles on a purchased register extract.