To check someone’s directorships, work through four public sources in order: the SEC’s EDGAR database for public-company board seats, the Secretary of State registry in each state where a private company is registered, the IRS Form 990 for nonprofit boards, and national corporate registries or an aggregator like OpenCorporates for appointments abroad. Each source covers a different slice of the picture, and no single one is complete on its own.
SEC EDGAR for Public-Company Board Seats
Any board seat at a U.S.-listed public company should surface in the SEC’s EDGAR database. The filing that matters most is the annual proxy statement, filed on Form DEF 14A ahead of each shareholder meeting. Proxy statements include biographical detail for every director and nominee, and SEC rules require them to disclose each director’s other board memberships at public companies or registered investment companies.1eCFR. 17 CFR 240.14a-101 – Schedule 14A Information Required in Proxy Statement The filings also cover principal occupation over the past five years, qualifications, committee assignments, and attendance.2eCFR. 17 CFR 229.407 – (Item 407) Corporate Governance
Use EDGAR’s full-text search when you don’t already know which companies a person is tied to. Enter the full name, then filter by DEF 14A or by 10-K, which also lists directors. Filings back to 2001 are indexed. Everything is free, and no account is required.
One boundary worth understanding: private-company board seats, foreign board seats, and nonprofit boards will not appear in EDGAR. It is a public-company source only.
State Registries for Private Companies
For a private U.S. company, the source is the Secretary of State or equivalent business filing office in the state where the entity is incorporated or registered. Every state runs an online portal covering status, registered agent, and at least some officer information.
What varies is depth. Some states list officers and directors by name in the online portal and let you search across all registered entities by an individual’s name. Others let you search only by company name and show only the registered agent and principal office address. In those states, finding director names requires pulling the actual formation documents or annual reports.
Preliminary company-status searches are generally free. Retrieving filed documents such as articles of incorporation, annual reports, or amendments usually costs somewhere between a few dollars and around $50, depending on the state and whether you need a certified copy. Those filings should show when each director was appointed and, where applicable, when they left.
Registry data can lag. Companies typically refresh officer and director information through annual or biennial report filings, so what you find may be a year or two behind the current board. If the timing of an appointment matters, use the registry as a starting point and confirm directly.
IRS Form 990 for Nonprofit Boards
Nonprofit directorships are often the easiest to verify. Tax-exempt organizations with gross receipts above $200,000 or total assets above $500,000 must file IRS Form 990 each year, and Part VII of that form requires the organization to list every current officer, director, and trustee by name, whether or not they are compensated.3Internal Revenue Service. Form 990 Part VII and Schedule J Reporting Executive Compensation Individuals Included The form also reports each person’s average weekly hours and any compensation received.
The full Form 990 is public. The IRS makes it available through its Tax Exempt Organization Search tool, which lets you look up any tax-exempt organization and download recent returns.4Internal Revenue Service. Tax Exempt Organization Search Third-party sites such as ProPublica’s Nonprofit Explorer and GuideStar aggregate the same filings and often make them easier to search by an individual’s name. If someone holds multiple nonprofit board seats, this is where you will see them.
Directorships Outside the United States
International verification varies sharply by jurisdiction. Some countries publish more than the United States does; others publish almost nothing.
United Kingdom
Companies House runs one of the more transparent registers anywhere. Searches are free. The public record shows each director’s name, nationality, month and year of birth, and service address, which is a correspondence address rather than a home address.5GOV.UK. Your Personal Information on the Public Record at Companies House Information about officers, including those who have resigned, remains on the register for the life of the company. You can search by individual name to pull every current and past appointment across UK-registered entities.
European Union
The EU’s Business Registers Interconnection System (BRIS) queries the national registers of member states in real time, with no fee for basic searches.6European e-Justice Portal. Find a Company Detail varies by country. Some provide director names through the portal; others require going into the national registry directly, sometimes with a fee or a registration step. EU data protection rules apply to personal data about natural persons in these registers, including directors, even where the data is technically public.7European Commission. Do the Data Protection Rules Apply to Data About a Company? Full dates of birth and home addresses are often redacted as a result.
Jurisdictions With Limited Access
In parts of Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East, corporate registries may not be digitized, may require in-person access, or may not carry director-level detail. Name searches also depend on knowing the exact local spelling, which may differ from an English transliteration. Specialized compliance firms with local staff and registry subscriptions are often the only practical route. Documents pulled from foreign registries usually need certified translation before they can go into a compliance file.
Aggregators for Cross-Jurisdiction Name Searches
Running individual searches across dozens of state and national registries is slow. Aggregator databases pull filing data from multiple jurisdictions into one searchable platform. OpenCorporates draws from official sources across more than 140 jurisdictions and lets you search by officer or director name rather than only by company. That kind of name search is the fastest way to surface directorships you would not have known to look for.
Commercial due diligence providers such as Dun & Bradstreet, LexisNexis, and Bureau van Dijk go further, combining registry data with litigation records, sanctions lists, media mentions, and corporate family trees. Subscriptions are expensive, but for firms doing this work regularly they cut a lot of manual assembly. The trade-off is that aggregator data is only as current as the underlying registries, and smaller or newly formed entities sometimes do not appear at all.
Reading the Results
The list is only half the work. What matters is the pattern across appointments. A few things experienced compliance teams watch for:
- Clusters of failed entities. One directorship at a bankrupt company can be bad luck. Three or four dissolved or liquidated companies on the same person’s record raise questions about judgment or involvement. Check the timeline: did the person join before the trouble started or after?
- Overlapping competitors. Simultaneous board seats at companies in the same market create conflict-of-interest exposure and potential antitrust liability.
- Unusual entity structures. Multiple boards at entities that share addresses, similar names, or common co-directors can point to a corporate network worth extra scrutiny, particularly in anti-money-laundering contexts.
- Gaps and inconsistencies. A directorship on someone’s resume that appears in no registry is a red flag. So is a registry appointment the person never disclosed.
Whatever you find, document it. Directorship verification belongs in Know Your Customer files, investment committee memos, and related-party transaction disclosures. The documentation itself is evidence that reasonable due diligence was done, which matters if the transaction or relationship is later challenged.
Checking Before a Board Appointment: Clayton Act Section 8
If the reason you are checking is that someone is about to be appointed to a board, one federal rule sits behind the exercise. Section 8 of the Clayton Act prohibits the same person from serving as a director or officer of two competing corporations when both meet certain financial thresholds.8Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 19 – Interlocking Directorates and Officers The FTC adjusts the thresholds annually. For 2026, the prohibition applies where each corporation has capital, surplus, and undivided profits totaling more than $54,402,000, subject to three narrow exemptions based on the size of competitive sales.9Federal Register. Revised Jurisdictional Thresholds for Section 8 of the Clayton Act SEC-registered public companies must also disclose related-person transactions above $120,000 involving directors, which is where overlapping board seats often first become visible.10eCFR. 17 CFR 229.404 – (Item 404) Transactions With Related Persons, Promoters and Certain Control Persons Catching an interlock before the appointment is far easier than unwinding one after regulators notice.
If You Hire a Vendor: The FCRA Threshold
Running your own searches on EDGAR, a state portal, or IRS Form 990 filings carries no Fair Credit Reporting Act burden. That changes the moment you pay a third-party screening company to compile the same information into a report used for a hiring or board appointment decision. Any report bearing on a person’s character, reputation, or personal characteristics and used for employment purposes qualifies as a consumer report under the FCRA.11Office of the Law Revision Counsel. 15 USC 1681b – Permissible Purposes of Consumer Reports
That means you must give the subject a clear written disclosure that a background check may be obtained and get their written authorization before the vendor produces the report. If you later take adverse action based on the report, you must notify the person, provide a copy of the report, and include a summary of their rights. The screening company must follow reasonable procedures for accuracy and allow the subject to dispute errors.
Why the Corporate Transparency Act Is Not a Source Right Now
The original Corporate Transparency Act would have created a centralized FinCEN database of individuals exercising substantial control over most U.S. entities, which would have made directorship checks considerably easier.12Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Corporate Transparency Act That is not where the rule stands. As of March 2025, FinCEN issued an interim final rule exempting all entities created in the United States from beneficial ownership reporting. Only foreign entities registered to do business in a U.S. state or tribal jurisdiction still have BOI filing obligations, and those filings do not require reporting any U.S. persons as beneficial owners.13Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. Beneficial Ownership Information Reporting FinCEN has also said it will not enforce BOI penalties against U.S. citizens or domestic reporting companies. The database is not a practical tool for verifying domestic directorships, and it should not be treated as one.