Licensed trade business in AT
What this register publishes today, what is missing, and the smallest change that would move it up.
What was found
The best equipped grade D in the index, and the direct answer to Germany one border away. Austria replaced fourteen separate provincial trade registers with one national system in March 2015, gave every trade licence a GISA number, and wrote free public access into the trade statute itself, so the query is open to anyone without a login and without a stated reason. For sole traders outside the company register it is the only authentic source there is. There is even a published interface specification, in two stages, with version numbers. What is missing is the file: no export, nothing to hash, nothing signed. Germany has the opposite problem and the same result. One country fixed the fragmentation and still did not publish; the other never fixed it. Neither professional can prove anything with a key.
What it publishes
| Check | Answer | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| A public page per licence | Yes | Gives a reader something to look at and a checker something to archive and attest against. |
| A bulk export | No | Lets a consumer hold the whole list instead of fetching one licence at a time, and lets anyone hash it. |
| Machine readable | Interface | A CSV or JSON rather than a page built for a browser. Decides whether checking can be automated at all. |
| Signed | No | Makes the file impossible to forge or mirror convincingly. Nothing reaches grade A without it. |
The next step
Give every licence a stable address
The register exists but lives behind a search form, so there is nothing to link to, nothing to archive and nothing to attest against. A permanent address per licence costs little and moves this row to grade C on its own.
A grade describes a register, not the authority behind it and not the quality of its supervision. An authority can run an excellent register and still sit at grade D because it is a search form.
If this row is wrong, it gets corrected with the correction published beside it. The index is useful only if it can be argued with. Tell the lab.