Hi, thank you for submitting your question to Answers.Google, I hope I
can provide the information you are seeking.
If you are looking for the sort of financial information which is
required to be published by companies which have publicly traded
stock, then edgar is your answer.
The key word in your question is ?public? meaning that the information
must be made public by SEC rules.
Merely being incorporated doesn?t create any obligation to publish
financial data for anyone other than the IRS and the particular
incorporating state?s tax department and these are just regular tax
returns similar to the ones which everyone submits.
By law those are confidential.
The sort of balance sheet financial information you see for companies
listed on the stock exchanges (or published in Edgar) are expensive to
generate and no closely-held company publishes that sort of
information.
You can obtain information about the officers and usually about the
ownership of even a closely held corporation by contacting the
incorporating body for the state in which the company is
headquartered. This is often the office of The Secretary of State for
the particular state.
If you are seeking financial information about the company which would
tell you if they are ?legitimate,? that is, pay their bills and meet
their contractual obligations, then you should contact the regional
chamber of commerce and the Better Business Bureau for the region
where the company has offices.
If you are willing to pay for the information you can get a report on
most legitimate companies by ordering a financial report from Dun &
Bradstreet, a credit rating company for businesses.
You can either go to smallbusiness.dnb.com or www.dnb.com/us to obtain
reports online.
There are also D&B sites for other countries but you appeared to be
asking about the U.S. Other sites can be located using the Google
search term as listed below.
The dnb.com/us site has a search box at the right side of the page.
You simply enter the company name, country, and the state. You may
have to search through several states because each state has its own
naming conventions and different companies can have the same name in
different states. You can probably determine the state by simply
keying the phone number into Google.
You can obtain a comprehensive report for $121.99. To see an example
or see other report options, go to
http://express.dnbsearch.com/reports.asp.
Google Search Term: dun and bradstreet
Google Search Term: Edgar
Thank you again for turning to Answers.Google for help. Of course you
can also try searching Google for the exact name of the company - it
would probably be best to include the name of the state or city to
narrow the results.
Since I have given some information here not obtained by a search, I
should point out that I am a principal of a closely held corporation
and part of the answer came from years of experience. |
