An agent about to pay an invoice asks one question first: is this company still active? registry-mcp answers from three national registers — Brønnøysundregistrene / Enhetsregisteret (brreg) by organisasjonsnummer (orgnr, org.nr), Companies House by company number, and Bolagsverket by organisationsnummer — and returns the same field from all three:
{"status": "active", "is_active": true}
The three registers do not mean the same thing by it. Only one of them even publishes it.
active is the absence of all four
brreg has no status field. It publishes konkurs, underAvvikling, underTvangsavviklingEllerTvangsopplosning and slettedato; active is what is left when none of them fires. The branch worth copying is the one before active:
if bankrupt is None and under_liquidation is None and under_compulsory_liquidation is None:
return StatusResult(CompanyStatus.UNKNOWN, "The registry record does not carry status flags.", False, [note])
return StatusResult(CompanyStatus.ACTIVE, "Registered and active in Enhetsregisteret.", True, [])
None is not False. A payload carrying no flags at all is unknown, never active — "the register did not say" and "the register said no" are different answers, and only one of them is safe to pay an invoice on.
Companies House does publish a status, and it is mapped one to one — no derivation at all. It also publishes company_status_detail, separately, and the pair active + active-proposal-to-strike-off is both legal and common. That detail arrives as a notes sentence:
Companies House has published a proposal to strike this company off the register.
It is still active today, but it may be dissolved within about two months unless
the proposal is suspended. Do not treat it as a stable counterparty without
checking the filing history.
A UK active with a note is a different fact from a UK active without one. The enum cannot carry that difference, so the sentence does.
Bolagsverket publishes nothing called a status. It publishes a strike-off date; a list of ongoing procedures (KK konkurs, LI likvidation, FR företagsrekonstruktion and more, which can arrive two at a time); and — from Statistics Sweden, in the same payload — a flag saying whether the entity is economically active. Live, today:
{
"name": "Telefonaktiebolaget LM Ericsson",
"status": "active",
"status_detail": "Registered with Bolagsverket and not marked as struck off or in any winding-up or restructuring procedure.",
"is_active": true
}
Read status_detail, not status. And read this twice: for Sweden, is_active: true means on the register and not winding down. It does not mean trading. Statistics Sweden's flag can say NEJ on a company in perfect standing — newly formed, dormant, a holding company with no operations — and that company is still active here, with a note saying so in plain English, and saying that SCB's question is a different one from being on the register.
We could have invented a dormant status. We didn't. That would change a shared enum for one country's convenience, and an agent would read it as a lifecycle claim about Norwegian and British companies that we have no data to make.
core/
The enum is shared; the derivation is not. Each country folder derives its own status and writes the sentence naming the signal that decided it. Three registers, three unrelated derivations, one shape at the tool boundary.
Which is the argument for putting a register behind an MCP tool rather than a scraper. A scraper hands your agent the word. A tool can hand it the sentence.
claude mcp add registry-mcp --transport http https://api.foretak.dev/mcp
Data: Enhetsregisteret (NLOD 2.0), Companies House (Crown copyright), Bolagsverket and SCB (free under the EU high-value-datasets regulation — and Bolagsverket names no licence, so neither do we).