ASIC jurisdiction, state and court codes

ASIC's register was built from the company and business name registers of the Australian states and territories, and that history is still visible in the data. Each organisation has a controlling jurisdiction, which for a company is almost always ASIC itself (code ASIC) but for a business name registered before the national register began in 2012 can be a state or territory. Addresses, places of registration and birthplaces use conventional state abbreviations such as NSW and VIC, and court orders affecting an office holder record the type of court. These are three different code tables and they are easy to confuse.

Where it appears in the API

• company.controllingJurisdiction and companyMatch.controllingJurisdiction use the controlling jurisdictions table.
• jurisdiction query parameter on GET /v1/companies/search and on GET /v1/business-names/{id} accepts a code from the controlling jurisdictions table. The default is ASIC.
• businessName.controllingJurisdiction and businessName.state on a business name.
• company.stateOfRegistration, address.state, birth.stateOrCountry, companyMatch.state and preAsicDocuments[].state use the states and territories table.
• officeholder.court.type uses the court types table and officeholder.court.state uses the states and territories table.
• registration.jurisdiction on a professional register extract uses the jurisdictions table.

Controlling jurisdictions

Jurisdictions

The difference between the two jurisdiction tables

The jurisdictions and controlling jurisdictions tables share the code ASIC and the eight state and territory codes ACT, NSW, VIC, QLD, SA, WA, TAS and NT. The controlling jurisdictions table adds four codes for the external territories: CCK Cocos (Keeling) Islands, CXR Christmas Island, JBT Jervis Bay Territory and NFK Norfolk Island. The controlling jurisdictions table is the one used for the controlling jurisdiction of an organisation and for the jurisdiction query parameter. The jurisdictions table is the older table and is only used for the jurisdiction recorded against a professional register entry.

ASIC's own tables use the digits 1 to 9 and letters A to D for these values; asicapi returns the abbreviations. The original digit or letter is shown in the ASIC code column of the tables above if you need to reconcile against ASIC's specification.

Victoria and business names

ASIC's public information service serves the Commonwealth (ASIC) jurisdiction and every state and territory except Victoria. Historical Victorian business name records are therefore not available through the API, and passing jurisdiction=VIC returns product_unavailable_in_jurisdiction (HTTP 403). Business names registered nationally since 2012 by Victorian traders are under jurisdiction ASIC and are fully available. Companies are always under ASIC's jurisdiction regardless of where they were originally incorporated, so this restriction only ever affects legacy business names.

The jurisdiction query parameter

Leave jurisdiction at its default of ASIC for companies and modern business names. Set it to a state code only when you hold a state business name registration number and want to look that record up with GET /v1/business-names/{id}, or when a search must be limited to one former state register. Products are enabled per jurisdiction on your asicapi account; a jurisdiction your key has not been enabled for returns product_not_enabled.

States and territories

These are the standard Australian abbreviations, plus the external territories CCK, CXR, JBT and NFK. On an address the value is null for overseas addresses, where country carries the meaning instead. On birth.stateOrCountry the field holds a state code for Australian births and a country name for overseas births.

company.stateOfRegistration is the state where the company was originally incorporated. It matters for companies registered before 1991, whose previousStateNumber refers to the former state register, and it determines the state on preAsicDocuments[] returned by the document list.

Court types

A court order can appoint, remove or disqualify an office holder. When it does, the office holder record carries a court object:

{
  "type": { "code": "S", "label": "Supreme" },
  "state": { "code": "VIC", "label": "Victoria" },
  "applicationNumber": "S ECI 2023 01234",
  "year": "2023"
}

S is the Supreme Court of the state or territory in state. F is the Federal Court of Australia, where most corporate insolvency matters are heard. M is the Family Court, which appears when a family law property order affects a shareholding or directorship.

Related