Before you sign with a new partner, ship on account or extend payment terms, a quarter of an hour spent on what the public registers say is time well spent. In Iceland a good deal of it is public and free of charge — though not all of it, and not all in the same place.
1. Find the company in fyrirtækjaskrá
Start from the kennitala: the ten digits a company receives on registration. It does not change, and it is not reissued to anyone else after the company is struck off. If you have only a name, search on it at the register's own search — but make sure you have the right company, because similar names are common.
Three things matter on the company's page: whether it is active or struck off, when it was registered, and its legal form. A company founded yesterday is not a bad sign in itself, but it does mean there is no history to judge it on.
2. Get the free registration overview
The public page names only one officer — the forráðamaður. The full board and the holders of procuration come in the free registration overview, ordered through Skatturinn's web shop at no charge, in Icelandic and in English. A certified registration certificate costs ISK 1,500 and is a different document; the overview is enough to see who can bind the company.
Two questions are worth asking: whether the person negotiating with you actually has authority to act for the company, and whether the board has changed recently. A change on its own says nothing — a change immediately before a large transaction is worth asking about.
3. Read the annual accounts
Public limited companies, private limited companies, partnerships limited by shares, co-operatives, savings banks, registered branches of foreign companies and self-owned institutions carrying on business must all file annual accounts with ársreikningaskrá for public disclosure — whether or not the company traded that year. The deadline is at the latest eight months after the end of the financial year.
The company's page lists every year filed, with the filing date and the account number. Electronic copies are free to download through the web shop. Look at operating revenue, at the result for the year, and above all at equity: if it is negative, liabilities exceed assets.
The absence of accounts is itself a signal. Filing is a statutory duty and carries fines — Skatturinn publishes a list of companies in default for each financial year. A gap of several years at a trading company is a question worth putting.
4. Check the VAT register
If a supplier charges you VAT, they should be on the VSK register. The registration appears on the company's page with the VSK-númer, the date of registration, the date of deregistration where there is one, and the ÍSAT activity code. Pay attention to the deregistration date in particular: if the seller was not registered when the transaction took place, the VAT they charged cannot be deducted as input tax.
Iceland is in the EEA but not the EU, so the European Commission's VIES service does not carry Icelandic VAT numbers. Looking one up there returns “not valid”, which is a fact about the service rather than about the company.
5. See the beneficial owners
Icelandic entities must register their beneficial owners — the individuals who really own or control them, as a rule those holding or controlling more than 25%. These appear on the company's public page with name, year and month of birth, country of residence, citizenship, holding and type of control.
Note what is not there: the individual's kennitala. The register prints a year and month of birth in its place. That is deliberate minimisation, and a good model for how such data should be handled everywhere else.
What it adds up to
No single one of these is a decision. Together they give a picture clear enough to decide whether to ask for payment up front, shorten the terms, or simply go ahead. And all of it is public — you need nobody's permission to look.