Treasury has designated a private company's dataset of state business registrations into the federal payment screen, and the comment period on it drew nothing

Fifteen days, and not one comment.

Treasury filed a notice for public inspection on Monday morning designating the United States legal entity dataset of OpenCorporates Limited into the Do Not Pay Working System. It is effective immediately. The proposal that preceded it went out on June 25 and took comments until July 10, and the final notice records that none arrived.

The system

Do Not Pay is the platform federal agencies, and state-run programmes paid for with federal money, search before they pay somebody. It runs under the Payment Integrity Information Act of 2019.

Under 31 U.S.C. 3354(b)(2) the Office of Management and Budget has delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the power to add databases to it where they would substantially assist in preventing improper payments, and the same provision requires public notice and an opportunity to comment before that happens. Fifteen days is what Treasury allowed. The notice does not describe a minimum.

What is in it

The June proposal lists the fields. Registered business name, business address, registration status active or inactive, incorporation date, dissolution date, employer identification number, and the name, position and contact information of the entity's officers. It is compiled from official state and territory registries, so every element of it is already public somewhere.

The use is verification, at three moments: when a business applies for federal funding, at a programme's eligibility cutoff, and at the time of payment. Treasury's notice says an inactive or missing registration may be a risk indicator that a business is no longer operating or was fraudulently created.

The Privacy Act question

Officers' names, positions and addresses are in the file. Treasury's position, set out in the June notice, is that the dataset pertains only to business entities and does not contain information about individuals within the meaning of the Privacy Act. That determination is why no Privacy Act analysis sits under the designation.

Access is governed by an agreement with OpenCorporates. Agencies using the dataset must agree to use it only to identify, prevent or recover improper payments.

The price is in neither notice

Treasury says it will incur costs to obtain the dataset, and further internal costs for maintenance and operational support. No figure is given for either. The proposal argues the benefit of buying once, centrally, rather than having each programme procure the data and build its own connection to it, which is a cost argument made without a number on any side of it.

One other thing changed between June and August. The proposal took comments at a Do Not Pay address. The final notice routes questions to a mailbox named AmericasBankAccountEO.