BrightQuery provides comprehensive U.S. company data for active and inactive businesses, covering:

• Verified firmographics (name, EIN, IRS industry code)
• Quarterly financials (revenue, net income, EBITDA, total assets)
• Monthly employment and payroll data
• Corporate family tree structures
• Information on directors and officers
• Business locations, loans, and stock authorizations
• Credit scores, fraud detection, executive details, stock filings, and more

BQ tracks:

• 100 million legal entities
• 70 million businesses
• 300 million addresses
• 60 million business owners
• 150 million employees

Most data spans back to 2010, with some elements available from 2017 onward. This diverse dataset supports research, due diligence, risk analysis, and economic insights.

BrightQuery delivers private company data with proprietary scores and regular updates, ensuring breadth and reliability.

BQ data offers the following unique features, for key customer segments/user cases: 

Public Capital Markets:

• Equities
  • Complete view of industry (all privates & publics)
    • Only 25-30% of U.S. aggregate revenue is accounted for by public companies
  • Supply chain & customer risk
    • Assess credit of private vendors & clients
  • Subsidiaries
    • Track financials of key subsidiaries (not reported to SEC)
  • ESG: employee benefits (not reported to SEC)
  • Monthly headcount & payroll (not reported to SEC)
  • Credit events (not reported to SEC)
• Fixed income
  • 40-50% of issuers are private
  • Standardized financials & credit events for both publics & privates
• Macro & munis
  • Complete coverage of the economy
  • Bottoms up aggregation of company financials

Private Capital Markets:

• Quarterly financials, with monthly updates
  • Revenue, Cost of Revenue, Operating Income, EBITDA, Net Income, Total Assets
  • Margins & ratios
• 2010 – present
• Credit events
• All U.S. private companies tracked in standardized verified fashion
  • All industries covered
  • All states covered
• Compare private to public companies using standardized financials
• Journey of company from private to public

Credit, Risk & Compliance:

• Quarterly financials, with monthly updates
  • Revenue, Cost of Revenue, Operating Income, EBTIDA, Net Income, Total Assets
  • Financial ratios & margins
• Headcount from DOL
• Industry classification from IRS
• EIN to verify identity
• Address validated with USPS
• Credit events from the IRS
• Benchmark to complete set of industry peers to identify anomalies
• Sophisticated risk model, with industry norms built-in

Corporates:

• Competitive intelligence
  • Find your competitors by name, industry, location
• Complete view of industry (all privates & publics)
  • Industry & regional data aggregated from company-level data
  • No surveys – just filings
• Verified firmographics for building lists
  • Industry
  • Zip code
  • Revenue, EBITDA
  • Growth rate of revenue
  • Growth rate of headcount
  • Credit score

BQ leverages the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests and sources data from: 

• IRS Form 5500 filings on employee benefit plans
• IRS Tax Audit tables & procedures for private company financial line items
• SEC 10-K and 10-Q filings for public company financial line items
• Department of Labor (DOL) employment and payroll records
• Department of Labor (DOL) unemployment claims, tied to companies
• US Postal Service (USPS) address & vacancy verification
• Small Business Administration (SBA) loans for small businesses

BQ data tracks the following information:

BQ currently does not track foreign companies or foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies. We only track businesses and entities that are operating in the U.S., including U.S. subsidiaries of foreign companies. 

For companies that do have foreign subsidiaries, the data is not consolidated for these foreign entities operating outside of the US, as companies are only required to report to the IRS and DOL their U.S.-based financials and other metrics.

Detailed information is available at:

• Documentation
• Coverage Counts
• Schema

Companies must file at least once per year per benefit plan (retirement and welfare). Most companies have a portfolio of retirement plans (e.g., 401k), and a portfolio of welfare plans (e.g., healthcare). BQ parses and harmonizes both sets of filings and performs meta-analysis of each company’s overall filings:  

1. Corporate taxes are filed quarterly, and employee-related expenditures are tax-deductible. Therefore, to ensure tax compliance, there is an incentive for companies to ensure the numbers in their benefits filings line up with their tax filings. 
2. In general, public companies file more often than private companies, and larger companies file more often than smaller companies. Some companies are highly compliant and file often, and others are delinquent. BQ uses the timeliness of a company’s filings as an informative indicator. 
3. A material change triggers the need for a new filing. The rules are complex in terms of what exactly constitutes a material change (varying based on welfare vs. retirement plans, size of the plan, whether the plan is insured, etc.). In general, a material change includes making adjustments to the benefit plan structure. 
4. A company has the right to amend its historical figures, up to 7 years in the past (like a tax return). Approximately 10% of filings are amendments. Macroeconomic and political events often trigger amendments. For example, when it became clear that Trump would be elected President, various Indian outsourcing companies with operations in the U.S. amended multiple years of history of their filings, presumably out of concern of being audited (since Trump had called them out in Twitter). 
5. In theory, a company NOT filing means no changes have occurred. Therefore, the absence of a filing is in itself informative, implying no material change has taken place. BQ uses this in its analytics; for example, if most companies in an industry filed a particular change, but a specific company of interest has not filed that change, then this is treated as informative. 
6. Finally, BQ also processes monthly filings from the Dept. of Labor that solely pertain to headcount and payroll. These filings must be submitted every month to each State in which a company has employees. BQ has been collecting and parsing these filings, and BQ has matched them to the benefits data.

BQ collects Annual, Quarterly and Monthly data. All of this data is updated on a monthly basis. The table below summarizes the timing and update frequency for our data.

We have all fields for all companies, but where we do not have data (i.e. the data is blank or missing), it’s because the company was not required to report the information, or, for various reasons, the data was missing from that filing, or “dirty” or corrupt and cannot be cleaned or verified for accuracy.

BQ collects filings directly from government agencies and performs a number of cleaning and matching exercises to create our database. We do not collect surveys or get permission from companies to access their data. 

BQ obtained information to gain access to the government filings via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). We applied to the relevant government agencies, in particular the IRS, and obtained permission to build electronic pipes to access and pull the data directly from the databases and other archives maintained by these agencies.

BQ’s founder, Jose Plehn-Dujowich, spent several years as a consultant with the IRS and had the inside tract to access data. He applied for and obtained permission to access the information via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), then used engineering to set up an electronic pipe to access the filings.

No, per FOIA, once the information is publicly available, it can be used for any purpose, without any restrictions. All the data is part of the public record.

No, BQ currently only tracks businesses and does not have information on individuals. For sole proprietorships, many times the business information is also the same as the information for the business owner, but we do not include any personal identification information in our datasets.  

However, BQ does have personal information for executives and directors but we have not processed it or made it commercially available, because data on people is sensitive and triggers certain regulatory issues. We just report one name for each business, which is the name of the person reported on the IRS filing. For larger companies, the person on the IRS filing is usually an accountant, CFO or someone else in the finance department. For larger companies, the person on the IRS filing is usually the business owner, a partner or another very senior executive.

The IRS has only had all filings computerized since 2010, so it was not possible to collect data electronically prior to 2010.

BQ financials for private companies are imputed from the schedules and forms companies report to the IRS as part of their tax filings. BQ uses the same algorithms and methodologies as the IRS does in its tax audit procedures. Some differences between BQ’s numbers and the financial numbers reported directly by the companies themselves will exist, primarily due to the following factors: 

1. Cash vs. Accrual Accounting: BQ reports IRS cash-based financials that may differ significantly from accrual-based numbers, especially for profit & asset metrics. A key reason for the differences seen are due to this accounting treatment. 
2. Small Company Bias: In general, smaller companies file less frequently for regulatory & practical reasons, meaning there is a greater lag in their reporting. As such, YTD financials reported by the company itself may differ from YTD financials gathered by BQ, since the numbers reported by the company will be more recent than the last filings the company reported to the IRS. 
3. Matching & Tracking Legal Entities: BQ matches filings from various agencies and across multiple legal entities, in part to account for M&A, various addresses & names, etc. Matching is one of the most complex aspects of data collection, so, in some cases, the correct entities may not have been matched. 

Quarterly vs. Annual Filings: Annual numbers are sometimes aggregated from quarterly (unaudited) numbers if an annual filing cannot be found or matched for a legal entity. This type of aggregation may introduce errors into the numbers.