Company and director
Director privacy changes and what they mean for company searches
Less director detail on the public register changes how you establish who is behind a company. It does not make it impossible.
Published · Reviewed
For years, a New Zealand company search gave you a director's name and a residential address, and that pairing did most of the identification work. The direction of travel is away from that. Director residential address information is being made less visible on the public register, with suppression available where publication would put a person at risk of harm. The change is a privacy improvement and an operational nuisance at the same time, and it is worth understanding exactly what it does and does not affect.
What the change is
The Companies Register exists so that people dealing with a company can find out who is behind it and where documents may be sent. Those two needs are not the same. Service of documents requires an address that works; knowing who is behind the company requires identification. Reforms in this area separate the two by keeping a usable service address public while restricting the display of a director's home address, and by allowing directors at risk of harm to have residential address information suppressed from public view.
The information does not disappear. The Registrar continues to hold it, and it remains available to those with a legal entitlement to it in the circumstances the legislation allows. What has narrowed is casual public visibility. Because the detail of these provisions has moved over successive amendments, check the current position on the Companies Office's own guidance before relying on any particular rule in a report.
Why it happened
The register was being used for purposes it was never created for, including locating individuals who had deliberately made themselves hard to find. Publishing a home address to the world is a serious step, and the reform reflects the view that the transparency purpose of the register can be served without it. That reasoning is sound, and it sits comfortably with the Privacy Act 2020's approach to necessity and proportionality.
What this changes in practice
Three kinds of search work are affected differently.
Entity due diligence is barely affected. If your question is who controls a company, how long they have been there, what else they are involved in, and whether related entities have failed, the register still answers it. Directorship and shareholding records, appointment and cessation dates, entity histories and constitutional documents are all intact.
Identification takes an extra step. Where the address was previously the tiebreaker between two people with the same name, you now need another discriminator: appointment dates, the pattern of related entities, shareholding through a common holding company, or an independent record such as a title or a registered security interest that ties the same name to the same context.
Tracing an individual through the register is weaker. The register was never intended as a locator tool, and it is less useful as one now. Where a current address is genuinely needed for a lawful purpose, the appropriate sources are the ones licensed for that use, subject to their own access conditions.
Rebuilding identification without the address
Use the entity graph
A person is identified as much by their pattern of involvements as by a single data point. Two directors sharing a name will rarely share the same set of co-directors, the same shareholding chain, and the same sequence of appointment dates. Build the graph outward from the entity in question and look for the overlap.
Corroborate against other registers
Title records, PPSR registrations and insolvency records are created for different reasons and at different times. Where one of them places the same name in the same commercial context, you have independent corroboration that does not depend on the Companies Register at all. This is the same corroboration model described in our article on verifying identity.
Report confidence, not assumption
When the residential address is unavailable, say so in the report. State what you relied on, and give the identity conclusion a confidence level. A report that quietly presents a service address as a home address is misleading, and the person reading it will act on it. In our experience, most identification errors in company work come from treating a service address as a residence.
Obligations that sit alongside the change
Reduced visibility does not create a new permission. If your purpose does not justify knowing where a director lives, the fact that another route to the address exists is irrelevant. Necessity under the Privacy Act 2020 is assessed against your purpose, not against availability. Equally, never treat suppression as a red flag in a risk assessment: it is generally granted on safety grounds, and penalising it in a screening decision is both unfair and indefensible.
Where credit or AML work is involved, the sector rules still apply on top. The Credit Reporting Privacy Code 2020 governs credit information regardless of what the company register shows, and reporting entities remain bound by their AML/CFT programme.
How intelID handles it
intelID presents company and director records alongside property, security interest and insolvency data, so identification can be built from the pattern rather than from a single field. Every search carries an authorised-purpose declaration and a full audit record, and role-based access controls which sources each user can reach. Read more on the platform page, see the integrated sources, or the workflow for corporate and compliance teams and law firms. To have accounts issued, request access.
This article describes a moving regulatory position and is general information, not legal advice.