There is a tremendous cost associated with an undefined or inadequately managed supply base. A formalized strategic sourcing process has become standard to reduce cost and leverage value from suppliers. A key part of that process is strong market intelligence including knowing your potential suppliers, their capabilities and cost trends.

Likewise, corporate governance needs to be well planned to ensure that a public company is accountable to its shareholders by having independent directors and financial accountability. There is a high price when corporate governance is poorly handled including costly litigation, a tarnished reputation and shareholder actions aimed at the company' board of directors.

One resource that is helpful in evaluating companies and individuals is Pretrieve http://www.pretrieve.com/ a search engine specifically focused on finding public records on a person or business. Public records have always been available but have been difficult to use as a resource tool due to the number of different jurisdictions one needed to often physically visit and the various access rules. The Internet has made the situation more manageable but it is still a daunting task to know what's available and where to find it. Pretreive conveniently aggregates public records from a variety of sources to address this problem.

Pretrieve is a different breed from the questionable outfits on the Internet that offer instant, low cost background checks but have issues with accuracy, coverage and timeliness and the much more professional and expensive services like Checkpoint, Accurint and Lexis/Nexis that have strict registration and usage requirements and who have recently been in so much trouble with security and privacy. A free site, Pretrieve is by no means the sole resource to be used for thorough due diligence but the integrity of its data sources are impressive making it a valuable starting place.

Pretrieve's database consists of thousands of public records sources and can match your search criteria to the relevant sources for you. For businesses, sources searched include UCC filings, SEC filings, federal contract recipients, patent applications, corporate registrations, state court records and domain name registrations. Sources linked to for searching individuals include court cases, property records, satellite images (from Google), professional and business licenses, birth and death records and political contributions.

To be thorough, due diligence must include some good old-fashioned local legwork. There is no substitute for a county criminal court search conducted in the locations where the individual has lived or the business is located. A county criminal check should be requested along with a Social Security number verification, which identifies the counties that should be searched for criminal records. Visit the Public Record Retrievers Network http://www.brbpub.com/pubrecsites.asp to locate someone to physically search the appropriate courthouses archives.

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