ASIC Public Notices API: Liquidations as JSON by ACN or ABN
A developer builds an alternative API for ASIC public notices, providing JSON data by ACN or ABN to track Australian business insolvencies efficiently.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Developer builds an alternative API for ASIC public notices in JSON format.
- Filters out routine deregistration notices to highlight true insolvency events.
- Supports lookups via ACN and ABN for easy ledger reconciliation.
Building software that interacts with Australian businesses inevitably requires tracking when a customer, supplier, tenant, or borrower collapses. The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) publishes winding up applications, liquidator appointments, and creditors' meetings on its Published Notices site for free public access, usually updating within a day.
However, ASIC lacks an official public notices or insolvencies API, offering no JSON, RSS, or bulk files, but only a search form and CSV export button. The search interface runs on an old ASP.NET form that posts the entire page back to the server, including a 23 KB __VIEWSTATE blob, preventing direct URL construction for paginated results. Furthermore, AWS bot protection blocks scripted requests with an empty HTTP 202 response while letting real browsers pass through.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
To overcome this, a developer built an API covering the last 365 days of notices, totaling around 312,000 entries. Volume can be misleading since about 80% of all notices are proposed deregistrations posted in batches, leaving roughly 30,000 actual insolvency events. The API structures this data into clean JSON format and always includes a source URL pointing back to the official ASIC notice for verification.
Another major challenge is that notices only carry an ACN, while most business ledgers store an ABN. The API solves this by maintaining a weekly refreshed copy of ASIC's Company Dataset from data.gov.au containing about 4.4 million rows. Users can pass either identifier to resolve it, or submit a batch of up to 50,000 mixed identifiers via a POST request to check an entire ledger at once.
Creating a robust wrapper API around legacy government portals highlights key data engineering challenges, particularly handling out-of-order data arrivals. Relying on an insert-assigned monotonic sequence rather than timestamps ensures that backfilled or retried notices are never missed or redundantly fetched.
The service also features company watchlists with webhook notifications, clear error codes such as unauthorized and quota_exceeded, and a health check endpoint. Documentation is available at insolvencyalerts.com.au/docs along with a 7-day free trial.
Source: Dev.to
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