ASIC office holder role codes

ASIC records every director, secretary, auditor, liquidator, administrator, receiver and responsible entity appointed to an Australian company as an office holder with a two-letter role code. The same codes appear on a printed company extract and in the JSON returned by asicapi, so a DR on the extract is a DR in the API. The full table has 37 roles. Most companies only ever use DR and SR, but the other codes matter the moment a company enters external administration or is a managed investment scheme, because they tell you exactly what kind of appointment was made.

Where it appears in the API

• officeholder.role on every item in the officeholders key of a purchased company extract and on every item from GET /v1/companies/{id}/officeholders, which reads that extract.
• role[] query parameter on the office holders endpoint and on GET /v1/people/{personId}/roles, which accepts any code from the office holder roles table.
• role.role on each entry in person.roles from GET /v1/people/{personId}, read from a purchased person extract; the member role SH from the additional person roles table appears there when the extract was purchased with shareholdings included.
• rolesHeld[].role from GET /v1/companies/{id}/relationships, read from a purchased relational extract, which uses the shorter company roles table because a company can only hold a handful of roles in another company.
• officeRoles[].role on a purchased professional register extract read through GET /v1/registers/{register}/entries/{number}, which uses the register officer roles table.
• licences[].type on a person record, which uses the person licence and register roles table.
• Appointees returned by GET /v1/companies/{id}/external-administration carry the external administration roles listed below.

Every coded value is an object such as { "code": "DR", "label": "Director" }. If ASIC adds a code that asicapi does not yet know, the label equals the code.

Company office holder roles

The 37 roles in groups

The alphabetical table is exact but hard to read. The grouping below is how compliance analysts usually think about the roles.

A company whose status is EXAD will have at least one current office holder from the liquidators, administrators or receivers groups. See external administration for how those appointments show up together with the related documents.

ASIC display ordering

Office holders are not returned alphabetically. asicapi keeps ASIC's own ordering so that a printed extract and the API line up. Roles are ordered in this sequence:

RN, CA, EO, DR, SR, LD, AA, AG, UH, RC, RM, PT, PQ, MQ, VQ, CQ, SM, CM, DM, OM, AQ, CR, MC, AC, AD, BI, BM, BP

Within each role, current records come first, followed by ceased records in reverse chronological order of the cessation date. Roles that do not appear in the sequence (for example SB, DA, TC, MA, RY, TN, PW, OQ) are rare and are placed after the sequenced roles. If you need a particular order in your own application, sort on role.code, status.code and ceasedAt yourself rather than relying on position.

Roles a company holds in other companies

A company can itself be an office holder of another company. These come back from GET /v1/companies/{id}/relationships as rolesHeld[], ordered current first in the sequence AG, DR, UH, TM, TR, RN, then ceased roles in the same sequence.

TM (trust management company) exists only in this table. DR here means the company is recorded as a corporate director, which is only possible for foreign companies and older records.

Officer roles shown on professional registers

When you extract an entry from the registered auditors, registered liquidators or other professional registers, ASIC lists the companies in which the registrant is an officer. For RN, TN and CA the related organisation is a managed investment scheme, so the organisation number is an ARSN.

FE (member of a futures exchange) is unique to this table and reflects legacy futures industry records.

Licence and register roles on a person record

The licences[] array on a person from GET /v1/people/{personId} uses this table for type. It tells you which professional register or licence the person appears on, independent of any company appointment.

LP (lodging party) means the person is recorded as the party who lodged documents with ASIC rather than as an officer. AF and FK relate to Australian financial services licensees: an auditor of a licensee and a responsible person named on a licence.

Member role

SH is the only entry. It appears on a person record when the person extract was purchased with "includeShareholdings": true, marking the person as a member (shareholder) of a company rather than an office holder.

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