Official company records for Papua New Guinea, on demand

Company registration in Papua New Guinea sits with the Investment Promotion Authority (IPA), which maintains the registers of companies, business names, business groups and associations alongside the personal property securities registry. Companies are governed by the Companies Act 1997, whose consolidated text the IPA publishes on its own site.

The IPA's online registry system went live on 25 November 2013 and handles new registrations, periodic filings such as annual returns, and document lodgement for foreign certification applications from overseas companies. Searching needs no logon or account and is free: the IPA states that anyone can search the register, that searches show such things as the current directors of a company or the owners of a business name, and that an extract of the full record of a business entity can be downloaded.

The IPA describes the information available to searchers, including company name, registration number, resident agent address and the names and addresses of the principals of the entity, as public information under the law. Filing against an entity's record is a separate matter: only a person holding authority over that entity within the registry system may submit filings, a control the IPA describes as protecting businesses from unauthorised filings. The Company Records report for Papua New Guinea provides the certificate of incorporation and registry extract sourced from the official register.