Company and organisational identifiers

As you look into spending data that includes recipients outside the government, you’ll find companies which act as suppliers to government, but also other types of entities including charities, associations, foreign governments, political parties and even individuals which act as recipients of direct assistance.

Identifying such entities is notoriously hard, since the only information kept by government is often a simple name (which may not uniquely identify the beneficiary, for example “MS”). While most (if not all) countries maintain company registers which assign some type of unique identifier to a company, these databases are often not accessible in bulk and not used coherently across different parts of government. Alternative identifiers – such as tax identifiers and company IDs from private business information suppliers (such as Dun & Bradstreet in the US) – further complicate this process.

As an alternative, open registries are beginning to compile organisational identifiers in a form that is easy to re-use and thus enables the sharing of databases which have been augmented with such information. OpenCorporates.com (http://opencorporates.com) is a startup that collects information from companies world-wide and provides a convenient API to match datasets with the list of known countries. They offer a service to ‘reconcile’ companies to link information about a company to a company name. This is especially useful when you have an exist spreadsheet or dataset featuring lots of companies. Matching (or reconciling) to legal entities allows you to get more information about the companies (for example the registered address or statutory filings), and makes it easier to match with other datasets or exchange with other organisations.

The IATI project for aid transparency is working towards similar standards for other organisations, such as foreign governments and charities active in the development space.