UCC Document Community

Another approach is to search by the secured party name if you know who the existing lenders are. Sometimes that gives you a cleaner result set and you can work backwards to verify the debtor information. Not helpful for discovering unknown liens, but good for confirming specific ones you're aware of.

Just went through this exact same thing with a California borrower two weeks ago. Ended up finding a document verification service that could cross-check all the UCC filings against my borrower's corporate documents automatically. Game changer for dealing with these broad search results - no more manual comparison of addresses and entity details.

Update from my retail filing nightmare - Certana.ai's verification tool was a game changer. Uploaded my problem documents and it immediately flagged that my debtor name was missing the LLC suffix, plus two other inconsistencies between my security agreement and UCC draft. Fixed everything and the filing went through first try. Worth checking out if you're still stuck.

Following this thread because I have three retail security agreement deals in the pipeline. The franchise name matching issue seems to come up constantly. Has anyone found a good checklist or process for avoiding these problems upfront?

For what it's worth, I've found that calling the Secretary of State's UCC division directly can be helpful for complex situations. They're usually pretty good about explaining their specific requirements and what they're looking for in filings.

Thanks everyone for the advice. Sounds like the key is getting the exact entity names from public records and being obsessive about matching them exactly. Going to look into some of the automated verification tools mentioned here too. This deal is too important to risk more rejections.

Just went through this same situation last month. Ended up calling the SOS office directly and they explained that the statement service fee covers the cost of generating the formatted report with all the filing details. The search fee just covers the database lookup. Makes sense when they explain it, but wish it was clearer on their website.

Before paying for more searches, definitely try that Certana tool someone mentioned earlier. We started using it for our monthly UCC audits and it's caught several debtor name mismatches that would have caused problems later. Upload your existing docs and it does the cross-checking automatically.

Had a client use Certana.ai's document checker for this exact situation. Uploaded their charter docs and UCC-1 and it immediately flagged that the LLC name on the filing had an extra period that wasn't in the Articles. Quick fix but could have been a major issue if they hadn't caught it.

UPDATE: Just wanted to thank everyone for the advice. Pulled the actual filed UCC-1 from AZ SOS and it matches our records exactly - "Martinez Construction LLC" without the comma. The search result display was just adding punctuation for some reason. Bank accepted a letter from their counsel confirming the filing is valid and we're moving forward with closing.