The order is deliberate. Identity comes first because every later check depends on knowing exactly which person and which entities you are researching. Claims consistency comes last because you cannot judge a narrative until you have assembled the record it should match. A founder passes the framework when the checks agree with each other and with the founder's own account. A founder fails when the record contradicts the narrative, or when the narrative depends on records that do not exist.
Check 1: identity and director history
The first task is to pin the subject to a unique legal identity: full legal name, known former names, date-of-birth range where registries disclose it, and every directorship or officer role ever held. The sources are company registries: ASIC extracts in Australia, Companies House in the UK, state filings and SEC officer disclosures in the US, and their equivalents elsewhere.
A pass is a coherent, continuous history: the same person, the same identifiers, appointment and cessation dates that line up with the career the founder describes. A fail is ambiguity that cannot be resolved, roles the founder never mentions, or a history that only exists in interviews and never in a registry. Our guide to director history checks walks through the mechanics, including the same-name traps that generate most false positives.
Check 2: corporate registry trail
The second check maps every company the founder has been connected to: incorporation dates, shareholdings where disclosed, charges registered over assets, name changes, deregistrations. Registry documents are cheap or free and they are dated, which makes them the spine of any timeline.
A pass looks like an unremarkable trail: companies formed for identifiable business purposes, filings lodged on time, ownership changes that match the founder's account of when they bought in and sold out. A fail looks like chains of short-lived entities, repeated late filings, strike-off notices, or transfers of ownership timed suspiciously close to trouble arriving.
Check 3: insolvency record
Next we search insolvency registers for every entity in the trail and for the founder personally: external administrations, liquidations, receiverships, deeds of company arrangement, and personal bankruptcy registers. In Australia the published notices and administrators' reports are particularly rich; our guide to reading a voluntary administration report covers how to use them.
A clean pass is no insolvency events at all. A qualified pass, and this matters, is an insolvency event at a company the founder had already left: the administrator's report and the registry dates establish who held control when the failure occurred. The fail case is an insolvency during the founder's tenure, especially one where the administrator reports possible insolvent trading or transactions requiring investigation.
Check 4: litigation and settlements
Court records come fourth: judgments, ongoing proceedings, class actions and, where they are public, settlement outcomes. We search federal and state court lists in relevant jurisdictions and read judgments rather than summaries of judgments, because summaries routinely blur who the actual defendant was.
Pass: no proceedings, or proceedings resolved without findings against the person. A settlement paid by a company is a data point about the company; it establishes nothing about an individual unless the individual was a named party. That distinction is the subject of our guide to corporate versus personal liability. Fail: adverse findings against the founder personally, or a pattern of litigation following the founder across otherwise unrelated ventures.
Check 5: regulatory actions
The fifth check queries regulator databases directly: enforcement registers, banned and disqualified persons lists, infringement notices, enforceable undertakings, licence conditions and revocations. Regulators publish these; there is no excuse for relying on press paraphrase.
A pass is absence from every enforcement register searched, with the searches logged. A fail is any personal action: a banning order, a disqualification, an undertaking given in the founder's own name. Regulatory action against a company the founder once ran sits in between and gets resolved by dates: was the founder a director or officer during the conduct period the regulator identifies?
Check 6: media record quality
Only at this point do we read press coverage, and we grade it before we use it. Reporting that cites documents, names sources and distinguishes allegation from finding is evidence. Aggregator pages, risk-score sites and articles that merely recycle other articles are noise, and name-association scores that ignore control timelines are worse than noise. The grading criteria are set out in our adverse media guide.
Pass and fail here apply to the coverage, not the founder: the question is whether the adverse material survives contact with the primary record assembled in checks one through five. Adverse coverage that checks out flows into the assessment. Adverse coverage that attributes corporate events to a person who had already exited gets recorded as a media-quality problem, not a founder problem.
Check 7: claims-versus-record consistency
The final check turns the lens around: we take the founder's own claims, from bios, interviews, pitch materials and websites, and test each against the record. Revenue milestones, exit values, growth figures, credentials, role descriptions.
A pass is consistency: the claims may be favourable, founders are allowed to be proud of what the record supports, but they must be anchored to it. A fail is inflation or omission: claimed outcomes the record cannot support, or an insolvency, judgment or enforcement action that the founder's public narrative simply deletes. In our experience this check is the single best predictor, because a founder who is accurate about the past tends to be accurate about the present.
How verdicts are expressed
Each assessed profile ends with one of three verdicts. Green: the record is consistent and no personal adverse findings exist. Caution: no personal findings, but the record contains governance failures, corporate collapses during the founder's tenure, or material narrative gaps a counterparty should price in. Flag: personal adverse findings exist, from regulatory bans up to criminal conviction. The verdict describes the public record at the date of writing, nothing more, and every profile states its sources. You can see the framework applied across our assessed profiles and stress-tested in the case studies.