Middesk
Editor's PickVerifies the business is real before you verify the human is
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Middesk answers one question: is this business actually what it says it is? It pulls directly from all 50 Secretary of State offices and IRS records, so when a vendor, contractor entity, or new employer account gets set up, you get back the legal name, registration status, formation documents, good-standing status, beneficial ownership info, and an OFAC sanctions check, in real time instead of someone manually Googling the company name.
For payroll fraud specifically, this matters most on the 1099/vendor side. A lot of payroll fraud isn't a fake person on your W-2s, it's a fake company getting set up as a contractor or vendor so someone can route payments to themselves. Middesk catches that at onboarding and then keeps watching, sending alerts if the business's registration status changes, a UBO changes, or something shows up on a watchlist later.
It's built to sit behind your existing signup or vendor-onboarding flow via API, not to be a standalone dashboard you log into every morning. That's great if you have engineers to wire it in, less great if you wanted something you could click around in on day one.
Pricing
No public price list. Middesk negotiates per-verification pricing based on volume. Companies running 1,000–5,000 checks a month have reported landing somewhere around $2–$5 per verification, with the number dropping as commitment and volume go up. Budget for a sales call before you get a real number.
| Core KYB verification | ~$2–$5 per request volume-tiered, negotiated |
| Monitoring & enhanced data | Custom priced separately from core verification |
Features
- Direct connections to all 50 Secretary of State business registries
- IRS EIN and tax ID validation
- Formation document and good-standing retrieval
- Ultimate beneficial ownership (UBO) lookups
- OFAC and sanctions list screening
- Ongoing monitoring with change alerts
- REST API plus a dashboard for manual review
- Pulls from actual government registries instead of scraped or third-party data, which matters when you're making a payroll decision off it
- Monitoring after onboarding catches fraud that develops later, not just at signup
- API-first design integrates cleanly into vendor and contractor onboarding flows
- US-only, so it's the wrong tool if you're paying contractors or entities outside the US
- No published pricing and no self-serve signup, expect a sales cycle
- Solves business-identity fraud, not individual employee identity, you'll still need something else for that side
Companies onboarding 1099 contractors, vendors, or new employer entities where the risk is a fake or shell company, not a fake person.
Businesses that only need to verify individual new hires, or anyone operating outside the US.
Screenshots
Supported countries
Integrations
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