UK Bankruptcy Check by Name — Individual Insolvency Register

Check a list of people against the UK Individual Insolvency Register — the statutory register kept by the Insolvency Service — and find out whether someone is an undischarged bankrupt, is in an IVA, has a debt relief order, or is subject to a bankruptcy restrictions order or undertaking.

Feed it a batch of candidates, proposed directors, tenants, borrowers or counterparties. Get back one result per name, with every matching register entry carrying the insolvency type, the court and case number, the order date, the register's own status wording, a computed current / ended flag, and a match confidence that takes the date of birth into account.

Background-screening vendors sell this exact lookup one name at a time, on a multi-day manual turnaround — CVCheck lists a "United Kingdom: Bankruptcy" check at AU$311.45 per single name with a 5-day estimate, and Veremark and Checkback International both sell a UK "Bankruptcy and Insolvency Check" as a named pre-employment screening SKU. This Actor runs the same lookup over a whole list, in seconds.

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What it does that a plain name search does not

1. It uses the date of birth to rule people OUT

This is the difference between a search box and a screening tool.

John Smith returns 149 records on this register. A tool that reports "149 hits" has told you nothing, and a tool that reports "1 hit" by silently taking the first one has told you something false.

Every match here is graded against the date of birth you supply:

dateOfBirthMatch	Meaning
match	The register's date of birth equals the one you supplied
conflict	The register's date of birth contradicts yours — almost certainly a different person
not_on_register	The register has no date of birth for this entry
not_supplied	You did not send one

Matches whose date of birth conflicts are kept and labelled, never silently dropped — the register's own dates are occasionally absent or wrong, and you should be the one deciding. They are excluded from the headline hasCurrentInsolvency flag and counted separately as conflictingDateOfBirthMatchCount.

A last-known postcode is compared the same way, including a partial credit for a matching outward code.

That produces one confidence per match:

confidence	Meaning
strong	Name matches and the supplied date of birth matches
possible	Name matches, no date of birth to corroborate it
weak	Fuzzy or surname-only name match
conflicting	Name matches but the date of birth contradicts

2. It gets the discharge question right

The register's status field is free prose, not a tidy code, and the wording is a trap:

Discharge Suspended Indefinitely (from 09/07/2004)

That person is still bankrupt. A naive reader sees the word "Discharge" and clears them. Every status is classified into one of three buckets:

caseStatusClass	Meaning
current	The register says the insolvency is in force
ended	The register says it has been discharged, annulled or completed
unknown	The wording does not clearly say either

unknown is never quietly folded into ended. Wrongly reporting "ended" is a false clear on somebody who may still be an undischarged bankrupt; wrongly reporting "current" merely sends a case for review. The register's exact wording is always returned in statusRaw so you can read it yourself.

3. It fails loudly instead of quietly

This register is a web page, not a data file, so the dangerous failure is not a crash — it is a layout change that returns HTTP 200 with no rows, and a tool that cheerfully reports "no insolvency found" for everyone on your list.

Three guards, in order:

1. A control search runs before any of your names. A name known to return thousands of records is searched first, its results table is parsed, and one case page is opened and checked for its expected fields. If any of that comes back thin, the run fails and screens nobody.
2. Every single response must carry one of two sentinels — the "Your search returned N records" header, or the explicit no-results block. A page with neither aborts the run.
3. A name the Actor could not check is reported as an error, not as clear, and is not charged for.

A false negative here is a compliance failure for you. It has to be impossible to reach quietly.

4. It tells you when a name was too common to check exhaustively

If the register holds more records for a name than the run read, the result carries searchTruncated: true and says so in its guidance. No silent truncation dressed up as a clean result.

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What it covers — and what it does not

The register's own front page states its scope:

Search for information about bankruptcies and insolvencies in England and Wales, including: bankruptcy orders, debt relief orders (DROs), individual voluntary arrangements (IVAs).

The Individual Insolvency Register combines the individual insolvency, bankruptcy restrictions and debt relief restrictions registers.

Not covered — read this before relying on a clean result:

• Scotland and Northern Ireland. Scotland's insolvencies are on the Register of Insolvencies kept by the Accountant in Bankruptcy; Northern Ireland keeps its own. Neither is searched here.
• History. This is a current register. The Insolvency Service removes entries roughly 3 months after discharge or completion. A clean result means "not on the register now" — not "never bankrupt". Every no-match result says so in its own guidance field rather than leaving you to infer it.
• Disqualified directors. Company-director disqualifications are a separate Companies House register, not this one.
• Identity. The register carries no unique identifier. A name plus a matching date of birth is strong corroboration, not proof. identifierGradeMatch is always false and every result links to the register's own case page in verifyAt so you can confirm before acting.

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Input

{
  "records": [
    { "referenceId": "CAND-001", "firstName": "Jane", "lastName": "Example",
      "dateOfBirth": "1980-04-17" },
    { "referenceId": "CAND-002", "firstName": "John", "middleName": "Peter",
      "lastName": "Sample", "postcode": "SW1A 1AA" },
    { "referenceId": "DIR-88", "fullName": "Alex Specimen" }
  ]
}

Field	Notes
firstName, middleName, lastName	Preferred. Unambiguous.
fullName	Accepted. Read as GIVEN NAMES SURNAME, or as SURNAME, GIVEN NAMES if it contains a comma. However it was read is echoed back in nameInterpretation.
dateOfBirth	YYYY-MM-DD or DD/MM/YYYY. Day-first — a US-order date is rejected rather than silently swapped.
postcode	Last known postcode, if you have it.
referenceId	Anything of yours; echoed back.

Options: statusFilter, includeCaseDetails, maxCaseDetailsPerName, maxPagesPerName, fuzzyThreshold. See the input form for what each does.

Names are matched punctuation-insensitively, so O'Brien finds OBrien and Abad-Santos finds Abad Santos. Previous and married names are matched through the register's "may also be known as" field, and flagged as matchedVia: "alias" rather than passed off as a match on the current surname.

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Output

One dataset item per input name:

{
  "referenceId": "CAND-001",
  "status": "ok",
  "nameInterpretation": "lastName/firstName as supplied",
  "searchTerm": "Jane Example",
  "registerRecordsForName": 1,
  "searchTruncated": false,
  "matchCount": 1,
  "currentInsolvencyMatchCount": 1,
  "conflictingDateOfBirthMatchCount": 0,
  "highestConfidence": "strong",
  "hasCurrentInsolvency": true,
  "identifierGradeMatch": false,
  "requiresManualVerification": false,
  "guidance": "POSSIBLE match: the name matches and the date of birth supplied matches the register's...",
  "matches": [
    {
      "registerName": "Jane Example",
      "matchType": "name_exact",
      "matchedVia": "name",
      "confidence": "strong",
      "dateOfBirthMatch": "match",
      "registerDateOfBirth": "1980-04-17",
      "postcodeMatch": "not_supplied",
      "insolvencyType": "Bankruptcy",
      "statusRaw": "Currently Bankrupt : Automatic Discharge will be ...",
      "caseStatusClass": "current",
      "isCurrent": true,
      "case": {
        "surname": "Example", "forenames": "Jane", "occupation": "...",
        "lastKnownAddress": "...", "alsoKnownAs": null,
        "court": "...", "caseNumber": "...", "caseYear": "...",
        "orderDate": "2026-05-12", "caseDescription": "...",
        "otherRegisterFields": {}
      },
      "verifyAt": "https://www.insolvencydirect.bis.gov.uk/eiir/case-details/..."
    }
  ],
  "attribution": "Source: The Insolvency Service, Individual Insolvency Register ..."
}

Any register field this Actor has not been taught a name for is passed through in case.otherRegisterFields rather than dropped — the register combines three separate registers and restrictions cases can carry extra fields.

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Pricing

Pay per event, and platform usage costs are included in the price:

Event	Price	What it is
Screening run	$0.05	Charged once per run — the control search and case-page check that prove the register is answering normally before anything is screened
Name screened	$0.20	Charged per name the Actor actually got an answer for. A name it could not check is not charged

For comparison, the manual equivalent is sold at roughly £160–£250 per single name on a multi-day turnaround.

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Legal and attribution

Source: The Insolvency Service, Individual Insolvency Register (https://www.insolvencydirect.bis.gov.uk/eiir/). Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Commercial reuse is expressly permitted with attribution, and the attribution line is carried in every output item. This Actor is not endorsed by or affiliated with the Insolvency Service.

The register is public, requires no account, sets no rate limit and disallows nothing in robots.txt; this Actor still paces its own requests.

The Insolvency Service's own terms note that errors can occur in the register. Confirm any result against the register itself — every match includes a direct link — before taking action that affects someone.