It has long been the case that a company search extracted from the records maintained with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has all relevant information about the company’s officeholders including the director’s residential address – this information is used by many organisations for different purposes. The information is regularly used by Liquidators in their investigations and commercial litigators for service requirements and location information regarding court proceedings. However, this information will no longer be publicly available on the company searches.

From 2 February 2026, following a request from Jim Chalmers as Treasurer, ASIC must no longer disclose the personal addresses of directors and other office holders and the date of birth will disclose the month and year only. This dramatic change, and which is the commencement of a tiered process which will result in new laws implemented on 1 July 2027, arose from 10 years of lobbying by the Australian Institute of Company Directors to address privacy issues, cybercrime and identity theft as a result of the information being publicly available. For company directors, this development ensures that their personal address information is not publicly available and misused if the information falls into the wrong hands. However, for other users of the information, this change is significant. ASIC will be working with third parties to ensure that the rollout of these changes are implemented properly and minimise the impact on those who require access to the information as well as protections for the directors and their personal information.

The information will still be available and maintained on ASIC’s registers but it will not be publicly available in current or historical company searches – access to the information will still be available to law enforcement agencies, government departments and those parties that require the address details for regulatory compliance. There may need to be a basis demonstrated for access of the information which is for “legitimate business and legal purposes”. However, those parties who do not have public access will still have the ability to obtain certain documents which are lodged with ASIC and disclose a director’s address but payment of the relevant fee will now be necessary.

Therefore, the new laws which intend to link Director ID information with the ASIC Register will mean that from 1 July 202,7 companies will need to provide ASIC with Director ID information when notifying changes to directors’ details or at the time of their annual review. The director’s address will be replaced with an address for service which must be provided for service of documents.

It is also intended that there will be a special class of ‘special use access’ users who will be able to access more personal information with the categories of users still under consideration by the government. Regulators, insolvency practitioners, financial institutions, journalists, victim representatives and litigants are all being considered as special access users (notably lawyers are not listed as part of this list of special users).

Furthermore, if a director believes that their family’s safety is at risk, an application for suppression of the address can be made to ASIC by lodgement of a Form 379 so that the address is completely suppressed or hidden from ASIC’s register.

Reflecting on the extent to which FCW Lawyers’ commercial litigators use the director’s address in a company search, this restriction will have an impact on some of the processes for which we rely on the company searches and the address of directors disclosed in those searches:

• Applications for substituted service of court proceedings on individuals rely on residential addresses that are disclosed in company searches and other documents to obtain an order for substituted service;

• Where service of a Creditor’s Statutory Demand (Statutory Demand) on a company’s registered office proves difficult, such as the documents being returned by post, reliance can be placed on service of the Statutory Demand under section 109X of the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth) (Corporations Act) to personally serve the director with the Statutory Demand. For this purpose, a solicitor will rely on the director’s address disclosed in the company search to effect service of the Statutory Demand under section 109X of the Corporations Act;

•  Court proceedings issued by a Liquidator against a director are required to be served personally and reliance will be placed upon the address disclosed in the company search unless there is knowledge of another address disclosed in the company’s books and records;

• Investigations will be undertaken by a Liquidator and the residential address which is disclosed in the company search will be important for the Liquidator when he pays a visit to the director upon appointment – the inability to access the address information may be critical because as soon as a Liquidator is appointed, it is important to be able to liaise with the director in order to ascertain the location of company assets, books and information and business information, particularly if a company has ceased trading.

Therefore, these changes will be significant for some professionals and business advisors because it may restrict the ability to be able to contact the director and obtain important information. There will need to be alternative options sourced as to how a director can be located and unfortunately, it may mean that further costs may be incurred in order to obtain certain documents in order to obtain address information. Hopefully these changes will not cause detrimental impact to plaintiffs or other parties in court proceedings, service of documents, applications for substituted service and other litigation or insolvency appointments, insolvency investigations and processes adopted by insolvency practitioners involving directors.