The Offshore Asset Search Starter Kit
This blog has been pretty clear over the years that an offshore asset search is not for the faint of heart or anyone on a tight budget.
We have recommended that even if you think there are assets outside the U.S., you could get a better idea of where they may be by searching U.S. public records first (The Offshore Assets Play Book).
Assume you want to do a little digging on your own for low-hanging fruit – signs of foreign assets that you could hand an investigator. You wouldn’t necessarily find the assets themselves, but you could provide useful leads that save you money if you eventually hire someone to do a fuller search. Some tips:
- Begin by searching widely, because the biggest mistake people usually make is to restrict the scope of their search too quickly. How do you search everywhere in the world without breaking the bank? There are a couple of free databases that list corporate directorships in overseas jurisdictions. The Offshore Leaks Database is a collection of various data dumps uncovered by journalists and includes names and addresses of directors and companies in some of the most difficult-to-penetrate offshore jurisdictions. You won’t find bank account information here but it’s a place you should always check. https://offshoreleaks.icij.org. Next, try Open Corporates. As above, it’s free and while not comprehensive it’s a good starting point.
- Remember that the Internet works abroad too. You can see company information in quite a few countries if you look for them. Company registration in England, for example, includes more information that you usually get with a private company in the U.S. British subsidiaries of U.S. companies publish their figures even if they aren’t traded on a public exchange. You can also get address information for directors, and with that you can sometimes find a person’s home address. Real estate in the U.K. isn’t easily searchable by name – you need an address. Companies House can help you get it.
- The internet now provides instantaneous translation. Say you come up with great public records in Dutch and you have no idea what they say. Open another window and paste a few hundred words at a time into Google Translate, and you can get a serviceable if not exact translation.
Will any of this replace what an experienced investigator can do? Not usually, because as I explain in my book, The Art of Fact Investigation, the real challenge of fact finding is in knitting together the output of various databases. More importantly, it’s playing smart hunches about which search terms to use and filing in the blanks the databases always leave. “John Smith and hidden assets and bank account” as a search term will never get you very far.
Still, if you run down some of these leads your investigator shouldn’t charge you for work you’ve already done, and you may get farther than you would have before.
In any search, that’s called progress.
