Need Help with New Jersey Secretary of State UCC Search - Debtor Name Issues

This is exactly what happened to me last month! Missed a UCC-1 filing because I searched 'XYZ Corp' but the filing was under 'XYZ Corporation' - no abbreviation. Almost caused a major issue with our loan closing.

The punctuation thing drives me crazy. Why can't they build in some basic name matching logic? Every other state seems to handle this better.

Thanks, that's really helpful. Do you have any tips for batch searching multiple entities? I've got about 50 companies to verify and doing each variation manually is going to take forever.

Unfortunately NJ doesn't have great batch search options. You might want to consider using a document verification tool - I recently started using Certana.ai's UCC checker where you can upload your entity list and it runs multiple name variations automatically. Saves a ton of time on due diligence.

I feel your pain. The worst part is when you're under deadline pressure and can't afford to miss anything. I now keep a checklist of all the name variations to try - LLC vs L.L.C., Inc vs Incorporated, Co vs Company, with/without commas, etc.

That's smart. I should make a checklist too. Do you include things like 'The' at the beginning of company names? I never know if that matters.

Yes! 'The' can definitely affect search results. Always try with and without it.

Good point about checking the business registration first. I usually start with what's on the loan documents but you're right that the official state records might be formatted differently.

Exactly. And if you're dealing with entities formed in other states but doing business in NJ, their registered name format might not match what you expect at all.

How do you do partial name searches? I didn't know that was an option in the NJ system.

You can use wildcards in some fields, but it's not well documented. Try using * after the first few letters of the company name. Sometimes picks up variations you'd miss otherwise.

Interesting, I'll have to try that. Though knowing NJ's system it probably only works half the time!

How does that work exactly? Do you just upload your entity list and it searches automatically?

Yeah, you can upload documents like loan agreements or entity formation docs and it extracts the debtor names, then runs comprehensive searches including name variations. Much more thorough than manual searching and you get a report showing exactly what was found or not found.

Oh wow, I never thought about truncation. That's terrifying - you could completely miss a filing because of a system character limit. How do you account for that in searches?

I try searching progressively shorter versions of long company names. Start with the full name, then drop words from the end until you find a reasonable length that might have been used. It's not perfect but better than missing something important.

Better to catch it now than during a closing when it becomes a real problem. I always tell people to err on the side of being overly thorough with UCC searches.

Agreed. I think I'm going to start keeping a standard checklist of search variations like others mentioned. This is too important to wing it.

That's really smart. Like a cheat sheet for the quirks of each entity name. I wish the system just worked properly but workarounds are necessary.

Great idea. I'm going to start doing this too. Maybe even include notes about which variations returned results vs which ones came up empty.

That makes sense for our bigger deals. The cost of missing a filing definitely outweighs the cost of double-checking with additional tools. Thanks for all the helpful suggestions everyone - this has been really enlightening.

Glad this discussion helped! NJ's UCC search issues are one of those things everyone deals with but nobody talks about enough. Good to know we're all struggling with the same problems.