People and entities

Tracked public bodies are joined to Companies House. Officers and persons with significant control are fetched from the public register and attached to the body they serve. Names are normalised so that a filing as J. Smith and a minute as John Smith can resolve to the same person where the evidence supports it. Active and resigned roles are kept. Private directorships sit on the same person as the public appointments, because the register does not split a life into “public” and “other”.

Entity detection then reads the document layer. Known officer names and monetary amounts are pulled out of minutes, registers and FOI files and stored against the person. A mention in a Sefton committee paper and a directorship at a London body are not two unrelated hits. They are edges on one entity. The join is automatic. Nobody is sitting with three browser tabs and a notebook doing it by hand.

It answers the question that due diligence and local democracy both stall on: where else does this person appear? A compliance officer checking a counterparty, a solicitor running a conflict search, a journalist tracing a board, all need the same picture. Official sites will not draw it. Companies House will not draw it against council minutes. Institrace does, because the people layer sits on the same graph as papers, land titles and offshore records.

That combination does not exist on Companies House, on a council portal, or on a media clipping tool. Those products stop at their own filing cabinet. The person in Institrace is the person across cabinets.