New Zealand Bankruptcy Check — Insolvency Register

A New Zealand bankruptcy check that answers the question a name search cannot: is this person currently bankrupt?

Give it a list of names. It searches the official New Zealand Insolvency Register and the Debt Repayment Order (DRO) Register published by the Insolvency and Trustee Service (MBIE), matches every name the register holds for an estate — including previous and alternate names — and returns each match labelled current, discharged or annulled, with the adjudication date, estate type, estate number and a verdict you can act on.

Built for pre-employment screening, director and trustee vetting, credit and supplier onboarding, AML/CDD files, and anyone who has been paying per name for this lookup.

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Why a name hit is not an answer

Two things about this register, both measured against the live API on 2026-07-30 rather than assumed:

1. Most of the register is history. Of the 228 estates returned for the surname Smith, 188 (82%) are discharged and only 38 are current. New Zealand keeps entries after discharge. So a tool that reports "found on the insolvency register" is right about four times in five — and wrong about the thing the buyer is actually asking. Status is a first-class field here and the verdict is computed from it, never from the presence of a row.

2. The register indexes previous and alternate names, and most tools don't use it. 84 of those 228 estates carry alternate names. Estate 843727 is filed as SMITH, Harvey and also holds Smith, Silexa — searching the alias alone finds it. This Actor searches every name you supply plus every alias the register records, in one lookup, for one charge.

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What you get back, per name

Field	What it is
verdict	CURRENTLY_INSOLVENT, REGISTER_HISTORY_ONLY, STATUS_UNAVAILABLE_VERIFY, NO_MATCH, NO_NAME_MATCH or UNCHECKED
currentlyInsolvent	true when a matching estate is currently open, false when the register answered and nothing is current, and null when a match exists whose status the register does not publish — so an unknown can never be read as a clear
undischargedBankrupt	true only for a current bankruptcy — a No Asset Procedure is an insolvency but is not a bankruptcy, and the two are kept apart
matches[]	every matching estate: estateNumber, registerName, matchedName, matchType, alternateNames, estateType, insolvencyStatus, adjudicationDate, addressAtAdjudication, administeringOffice, verifyAt
matchType	name_exact › name_strong › name_partial › surname_only › token_only
guidance	plain-English reading of the result, including what was not covered
register	the integrity block: newest adjudication date, source age in days, canary count, verified-at

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Input

{
  "names": [
    { "referenceId": "CAND-001", "fullName": "Harvey Smith" },
    { "referenceId": "CAND-002", "firstName": "Alec", "middleName": "Arthur", "lastName": "Smith" },
    { "referenceId": "CAND-003", "fullName": "Ana Jones", "previousNames": ["Ana Wiremu"] }
  ]
}

A bare string works too: {"names": ["Harvey Smith"]}. Any extra fields you attach are echoed back on the result so it reconciles with your own system.

includeSurnameOnlyMatches (default false) additionally lists entries sharing only the surname. They are labelled surname_only and never change the verdict.

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How the matching works, and why

The register's search is word-order sensitive in an undocumented way: harvey smith returns 194 estates, smith harvey returns 19, and harvey smith x returns 228 — the same as smith on its own. A screening tool whose recall depends on which order the buyer typed a name in is not a screening tool.

So this Actor queries the surname as a single token — the widest recall-safe query the API offers — pages through the entire result set, and grades every candidate locally against every name and alias you supplied. The widest possible query, the most common surname in the country, is 228 rows: one page. The grading code is deterministic and covered by an offline test suite run against captured live responses.

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It fails loudly rather than clearing you by accident

For a screening product, the dangerous output is not an error — it is a confident "no record found" produced by a source that was quietly broken. That is the answer the buyer was hoping for, and nothing anywhere says a word.

Before a single name is screened, and before anything is charged, the run verifies:

• Completeness — the surname Smith must return at least 100 estates (228 measured). Below that the index is truncated and every "no match" this run would produce could be a false clear.
• Currency — the newest adjudication on the register must be within 60 days. Measured over the 500 most recent estates spanning 674 days, the longest gap between consecutive adjudication dates is 19 days, so 60 is roughly 3× the worst observed quiet spell.
• The DRO register answers as well as the main one.
• Pagination integrity — the rows received must equal the API's own totalItems, or the run fails rather than under-reporting.

If any of these fail, the run stops with an explanation and you are not charged. A name that cannot be read or cannot be checked comes back as UNCHECKED, is not charged for, and is explicitly not reported as clear.

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Limits — read these before you rely on it

• This register carries no date of birth. A person can never be confirmed from it. Every match is a possible match on name, requiresManualVerification is set, and each result links to the official register page to confirm.
• It does not cover the Companies Office register of banned or disqualified directors. That is a separate register behind a RealMe login, and the Insolvency Register's own search page links out to it.
• It does not cover company liquidations, receiverships, the Financial Service Providers Register, or any non-New-Zealand insolvency.
• Debt Repayment Order entries publish no status, so they are reported as status-unavailable and flagged for manual verification. They never count towards a clear.
• It reports what the register says. It does not give legal advice, and it does not tell you whether someone is eligible for any particular role.

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Source and attribution

Source: New Zealand Insolvency and Trustee Service (Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment), public Insolvency Register and Debt Repayment Order Register — https://www.insolvency.govt.nz/. A public register, searchable by anyone, no account required. Not endorsed by MBIE. Every output item carries the attribution string.

Pricing

Pay per event. screening-run is charged once, after the register has been verified. name-checked is charged per name actually screened — every previous and alternate name for that person is included in the same charge. Platform usage costs are passed through.