How to uniquely identify an officer

API Question
#1

Hi, I’m struggling to figure out how I can uniquely search for an officer given that they’re a part of another company.

More specifically, given a company name, I’d like to be able to check the profiles of all the active directors to see what they have previously been a part of (and what happened).

Is there a way to do this? It seems like there’s no such unique identifier, so I’d have to rely on searching by name then matching by birthday and address, which isn’t foolproof since addresses and such may not match due to erroneous commas and the like.

Thanks

#2

Two answers:

  1. This is simple - isn’t this exactly what the Officers Appointments does? (Try it online here)

You can find that for a given officer that you’ve e.g. looked up via the Officers list, in the links - officer - appointments member.

OR 2) It may work but I’m not sure how accurate this is. I’m pretty sure I’ve found multiple entries for what appear to be “the same” corporate entities at least. Companies House clearly try to link “the same” individual (or entity) but they are also going to be limited on this, depending on what data they use to match. I don’t think they use e.g. passport number, NI number or other “unique” indentifiers for example.

For example - what happens if someone is an officer of a company (or companies), then quits all of them, then changes address, then becomes an officer of another company? Or has a different residential address on an application? Or there was a slight difference in their name (perhaps they had a new title, they changed it, or included an extra forename, or there was a typo…)