Look up a Norwegian legal entity

Retrieve registration details for a legal entity from Norway's Central Coordinating Register for Legal Entities (Enhetsregisteret), maintained by the Brønnøysund Register Centre. Every legal entity operating in Norway is assigned a unique 9-digit organization number and registered in this central register.

Usage

brreg_entity(
  org_nr,
  registry = c("auto", "enheter", "underenheter"),
  type = c("code", "label")
)

Arguments

org_nr: Character. A single 9-digit Norwegian organization number. Validated using brreg_validate() before the API call; a vector of several numbers is an error (iterate with lapply()).
registry: One of "auto" (default, tries enheter then underenheter), "enheter" (main entities only), or "underenheter" (sub-entities only). Sub-entities have different fields (e.g. overordnetEnhet for the parent entity, beliggenhetsadresse instead of forretningsadresse).
type: A type of variables: "code" (default) returns raw codes, "label" returns English labels for coded columns (legal form, NACE, sector, etc.), following the eurostat package's pattern. Labelling NACE and sector codes consults SSB KLASS on first use in a session; see get_brreg_dic().

Value

A tibble with one row and one column per field the API returned, named via field_dict, plus registry (which registry answered) and deleted (logical). Frequently present columns include org_nr, name, legal_form, employees, founding_date, nace_1, municipality_code, bankrupt, and parent_org_nr; historiske_navn and annotations are list-columns of tibbles (see the section on tidy shape).

Details

Column names are translated from Norwegian to English via the package field dictionary (field_dict). API fields not in the dictionary pass through with auto-generated snake_case names, so new fields added by brreg are never silently dropped. Use brreg_label() to translate coded values (legal forms, NACE codes) to English descriptions.

Observed fields only

The register emits only the fields that apply to an entity: a sole proprietorship (ENK) typically carries no founding_date or employees, a foreign branch (NUF) no municipality_code. The returned columns are exactly the fields the response carried, so every column other than org_nr, registry and deleted is conditionally present. Test for a column with "x" %in% names(result) rather than assuming it.

Tidy shape

Every tibble the package returns is tidy in Wickham's sense: one observation per row, one variable per column, one observational unit per table. The register nests two kinds of array inside an entity. Arrays of strings (business_address, postal_address, location_address, purpose, activity) are the line fragments of one value and are joined with "\n", which no fragment contains, so strsplit(x, "\n") recovers the lines. Arrays of objects (historiske_navn, annotations, any array of objects the register adds) are observations of another unit and are nested as a list-column of tibbles, one row per element with snake_case columns, NULL for an entity without them; tidyr::unnest() expands them to their own table. An empty array is not an observation and emits no column. Nothing is serialized to JSON text.

Deleted entities

BRREG reports a deleted entity either as HTTP 410 or, for most deletions, as HTTP 200 with respons_klasse = "SlettetEnhet" and a slettedato. Both are modelled the same way: deleted is TRUE, deletion_date is the parsed date, every other field the response carried is kept, and a tidybrreg_warning_deleted is signalled (silence it with suppressWarnings(classes = "tidybrreg_warning_deleted")). Live entities carry deleted = FALSE.

Examples

if (FALSE) { # interactive() && curl::has_internet()
# Equinor ASA — Norway's largest company
brreg_entity("923609016")

# With English labels (eurostat pattern)
brreg_entity("923609016", type = "label")

# Or pipe to brreg_label() for more control
brreg_entity("923609016") |> brreg_label(code = "legal_form")
}