Sources to check number and kind of employees a corporation has

June 9, 2015 12:22 PM

What are all the different things I could look at to check to see if a corporation is being honest about how many and what kinds of employees it has?

I have thought and looked at 990 tax forms. What else? What are all the different ways a large corporation would have to report their number and what kind of employees it has (e.g., construction, clerical, administrative, etc.)? What all is submitted to the federal government? Maybe insurance applications? What else?

I want to find things where I can say "you are claiming this type of person is your employee here, but that's not what you said over here."

posted by dios to Law & Government (8 answers total)

This will be difficult.

I'm speaking as a business owner, and the only times I have to report number of employees were

1) To IRS, as part of tax withholding information, NOT as a part of my tax return

2) Worker's Comp, for their calculation of my premiums, may not be public

3) California EDD (obviously does not apply outside California), same as IRS (but for Unemployment, not tax)

If you are looking for misclassification of employees as contractors, or massive misclassification of employees to "game" the premium for Worker's comp... that's not something you can infer from publicly available documents that I am aware of. You'll need to basically "audit" the company, examine their paperwork, and so on.
posted by kschang at 12:34 PM on June 9, 2015

What do you mean by "employee" - that is, which system's definition of "employee" are you using? The definition of who is an employee for State A tax purposes, may be different than for State B tax purposes or federal tax purposes or workers comp or health insurance or car insurance or disability or unemployment or or or....

Are you looking for public/searchable records, things you can get via a FOIA request, or information including specific employee names etc (this will probably be protected by various privacy laws/regulations/policies)? I don't know that anything you can get (outside of a legal discovery process) would actually be "gotcha" material. The differing jurisdictions, definitions, reporting periods, etc, would be an easy explanation for any discrepancy in the numbers.

Can you give us more info on the purpose of the information you're looking for? Maybe there's something else that would work for that purpose?
posted by melissasaurus at 12:44 PM on June 9, 2015

If they're publicly traded there's the SEC site.

If they're getting grants or funding or an SBA company there may be some application somewhere.
posted by resurrexit at 1:10 PM on June 9, 2015

Less reliably, you could cross-check news stories, especially about headquarters, operations, anything like that. You'd be looking for a sentence like "the 1M ft2 facility houses 300 of the company's 400 workers, as well as a mini golf course and subsidized ice cream parlor."
posted by chesty_a_arthur at 1:17 PM on June 9, 2015

Try Hoover's or Dun & Bradstreet. The latter definitely does tell you the number of employees, but I don't think it breaks them out by type. You have to pay for both of these reports, but they may be available for free through your public library, which often subscribes to these databases.
posted by amicus at 2:26 PM on June 9, 2015 [1 favorite]

Many public libraries have access to a database called Reference USA and that database has estimates of employees for every business.
posted by zzazazz at 4:14 PM on June 9, 2015

I believe Dun and Bradstreet relies on companies self-reporting, so keep that in mind if the honesty of the corporation is in question.

If the co is publicly traded, the 10-ks and 10-Qs will usually mention that info. Also self reported, but often vetted by attorneys/accountants and there are stiff penalties for lying to the SEC.
posted by slateyness at 8:28 PM on June 9, 2015

SEC filings are your best bet, but that only covers some of the companies out there. For most, you don't have a chance of getting this data. And they almost never break down employee headcounts by job field.

I want to find things where I can say "you are claiming this type of person is your employee here, but that's not what you said over here."

Do that, and you'll fall flat on your face. Counts like this are either (1) at a given point in time, or (2) the average over a set period of time. In either case, it's very unlikely that numbers would match - but that doesn't indicate dishonesty. Any company large enough to have SEC filings (or similar) is seeing a change in headcount on a daily basis.
posted by NotMyselfRightNow at 11:39 AM on June 11, 2015