Where Indiana Keeps the Records That Locate a Person
Indiana rewrote its Access to Public Records Act with effect from the first of July 2026, and it did so with a particular kind of requester in mind: the automated, out-of-state, commercial one. Under House Enrolled Act 1360, an Indiana agency may build a portal that checks whether you are a real person and whether you live in Indiana, may put resident and non-commercial requests ahead of yours, may charge you a supplemental fee for being out of state, and may refuse outright anything it suspects of data scraping or phishing – reporting the request to a state office either way. Much of this industry is exactly who that describes. This page says so, explains how a request is made lawfully under the new rules, and notes that the statute’s fresh definition of phishing is a precise description of pretexting. General information about Indiana records practice, not legal advice.
The Statute That Was Written About Requesters Like Us
Signed in March, effective in July, and unanimous in both chambers.
Governor Mike Braun signed House Enrolled Act 1360 on the fourth of March 2026 and it took effect on the first of July. It passed the Indiana House ninety-five to nothing and the Senate forty-eight to nothing. It amends Indiana Code 5-14-3, the Access to Public Records Act, and the Office of the Indiana Public Access Counselor has published an overview explaining what changed and why.
The why is stated without euphemism. Agencies had reported “an increasing number of bulk public records requests that appear to originate from automated sources rather than individuals”, along with phishing attempts arriving by email, and “the rise of data scraping and automated systems employed by certain organizations” had put “significant strain on public agency resources”.
What an Indiana agency may now do
- Screen you at the door. Indiana Code 5-14-3-3.3(a) lets an agency establish an electronic portal for the submission of records requests that incorporates a CAPTCHA “or an equivalent mechanism for ensuring that a requestor is a human”, “requires verification of a requestor’s physical address”, “indicates to the public agency whether the requestor is a resident of Indiana”, and “automatically tracks and reports submissions suspected to be automated or to have originated from known sources of phishing or data scraping”. Those four items are the enacted text of the subsection, quoted from it rather than from anyone’s summary of it.
- Put you behind other people. Section 8.1(a) lets agencies give priority to requests from Indiana residents and to requests made for civic, journalistic, academic, or personal use – and to get that priority, “the requestor must clearly state the purpose of the request”. Section 8.1(b) lets an agency delay out-of-state and automated requests as necessary to prevent disruption of its core functions.
- Charge you more. A supplemental fee may be collected on out-of-state or automated requests. Under section 8(n) it must be “reasonably related to the cost of fulfilling the request” and may not exceed twenty-five cents per page and twenty-five dollars per hour of staff time spent processing the request – the enacted cap is conjunctive, both limbs, although the counselor’s own overview paraphrases it disjunctively as “$0.25 per page or $25 per hour”. Section 8(o) lets an agency waive it where the request serves the public interest. The further requirement that an adopted fee be applied consistently to all out-of-state and automated requests comes from the counselor’s guidance rather than from the statute, which imposes no such duty in terms.
- Refuse you on suspicion. An agency may deny a request it suspects to be data scraping, to be phishing, or to be a request for electronic transmission that could expose or jeopardise the security of its electronic systems or data.
- Tell the state about you either way. If it denies on that basis it must notify the Public Access Counselor of the request and the statutory basis, no later than seven days after receiving it. And if it decides to fulfil a request it nonetheless suspects of scraping or phishing, it must still report that too.
The discovery-duplication denial, which is far narrower than it is usually reported
HEA 1360 also gave agencies a denial ground aimed at records requests that shadow litigation discovery. Nearly every account of it we have read – including the counselor’s own one-line summary near the front of its overview, “HEA 1360 authorizes agencies to deny requests that are duplicative of the litigation discovery process” – drops the condition that does all the work. The operative provision, which the counselor sets out in full further in and reproduces verbatim in its companion statutory-additions document, reads:
Indiana Code 5-14-3-4(e). “A public agency may deny a request under this chapter for a record if the request: (1) is made by a person that is a party to pending or ongoing litigation; and (2) is duplicative of a discovery request made by the person in the pending or ongoing litigation.“
Both limbs, and the same person in both. A requester who is not a party to the litigation is outside the subsection entirely, however closely the records sought overlap the ground discovery covers – and a records-research firm engaged by a party is not itself a party. So this is not, as it is widely summarised, a general power to refuse anything that looks like discovery by another route. It is a narrow anti-duplication rule addressed to litigants re-asking their own discovery through the records act. If an Indiana agency ever invokes it against a request of ours, the first question is which of the two limbs it says is satisfied, and the answer to the first limb is normally no.
That said, the reason we would rather a party’s discovery went through discovery is not the statute. It is that an attorney with a live case has an instrument that compels, with a judge behind it, and a records request does not.
Separately, the Public Access Counselor is now required to track the number and type of requests received across Indiana and to flag patterns tied to automation, phishing or data scraping. Agencies feed that in two ways: contemporaneous reports during the year, which are running now, and an annual report that has not started yet. The first agency annual report covers the first of July 2026 to the thirty-first of May 2027 and is due to the counselor by the eleventh of June 2027, with the counselor’s own report to the General Assembly due by the thirtieth of June 2027.
The distinction that is easy to get backwards
It is tempting to summarise all this as “Indiana can now refuse automated requests”. That is wrong, and the Public Access Counselor says so in terms: an agency “does not have discretionary authority to deny a request solely because it is a suspected automated request”. Automation triggers reporting, and it exposes a request to deprioritisation and to the supplemental fee. Outright denial requires suspected data scraping, suspected phishing, or a cybersecurity risk. Those are different tests and a page that blurs them would mislead you about what an Indiana agency can actually do.
Two definitions now written into the records statute
HEA 1360 defines both key terms for the first time. “Data scraping” means use of an automated system to extract data from websites and other Internet accessible sources. And “phishing” means a method of obtaining information through fraud, where the sender hides or misrepresents who they are to trick the recipient into sharing information or granting access. Cybersecurity risk, by contrast, is deliberately left undefined in the code.
Read that phishing definition again slowly, because it is the reason this page leads with a statute rather than with a courthouse. Indiana has now put a definition of it into the public records act and attached a denial power and a mandatory report to a state office. What used to be an industry ethics question in this state is now a statutory category.
Where That Leaves This Firm, Stated Before Anything Else
On most of our state pages this section sits near the bottom. Here it is the subject.
We are the out-of-state commercial requester the statute contemplates
There is no honest way to write an Indiana page in 2026 without saying that. An Indiana agency that adopts the new intake questions will ask whether the requester is an Indiana resident, whether the request is made on behalf of an in-state or out-of-state person or entity, and whether the purpose is civic, philanthropic, journalistic, academic, personal, commercial, or something else. On most files our answers put us in the deprioritised column and expose the request to the supplemental fee.
So we answer the questions accurately, state the purpose plainly as the statute requires for priority even when we do not qualify for it, pay the supplemental fee where an agency has adopted one, and accept the position in the queue that Indiana has decided we should have. Nothing here points automation at an Indiana agency portal. Requests are made by a named person on a stated purpose, one file at a time. That was true before July and it is now also the difference between a request that gets answered and one that gets refused and reported. It has a practical edge for creditors in particular: locating a judgment debtor in Indiana now carries a queue position and, at any agency that has adopted the surcharge, a per-page and per-hour cost that did not exist before July. Both belong in the estimate at the opening of a file rather than in an explanation at the end of one.
Not a consumer reporting agency, and not a screening product
This firm is not a consumer reporting agency, and nothing leaving this desk is a consumer report. It cannot decide a tenancy application in Fort Wayne or Evansville, an employment or promotion outcome, an extension of credit, or the price an insurer sets. Those belong to a regulated product carrying disclosure duties and a dispute route for the person it describes, and no locate report becomes one by being used as though it were. Indiana landlords and lenders come to us after a tenancy has ended or a balance exists; anybody still weighing an application should be talking to a screening company, and we will say so rather than take the work.
Watch: Asking Indiana Properly
What a records request has to look like in this state since July.
Watch Overview
Indiana Keeps a Referee for Records Disputes
A standing referee between a requester and an agency, and it now has a new job.
Indiana maintains an Office of the Public Access Counselor whose function is to interpret and adjudicate access to public records and public meetings. It issues formal advisory opinions and informal opinions, accepts formal complaints when a request is refused, publishes a Public Access Handbook and an annual report to the legislature, and maintains a searchable archive of past opinions.
That matters more than it sounds. Without such an office, a refused records request leaves you with a choice between accepting the refusal and litigating it. Indiana provides a middle step: a state officer who will look at the refusal and say, in writing, whether it was right. For anybody working Indiana records seriously, the archive of past opinions is a reference work – it tells you how a particular kind of refusal has been treated before you spend anything arguing about it.
What HEA 1360 added to the job
Since July the counselor’s remit has grown in a direction worth understanding. The office now receives the mandatory notices agencies must send when they deny a request on suspicion of data scraping or phishing, and the notices agencies must send when they fulfil such a request anyway. It publishes weekly complaint transparency reports, and it operates dedicated notice channels for a request denied due to suspicion and for suspicion of a fulfilled request. It is also required to track the number and type of requests received across Indiana agencies and to flag patterns tied to automation, phishing or data scraping.
Two things follow. The first is that a suspicion-based refusal in Indiana is now a documented event at state level rather than a private disagreement with a clerk, which cuts in favour of a requester who was behaving properly. The second is that a firm whose Indiana requests attracted a pattern of such reports would be visible as a pattern. We regard the second as a feature rather than a hazard, and it is one of the reasons this page is written the way it is.
Making an Indiana Request That Actually Gets Answered
The right-hand column is what the current statute does with each approach.
Since July the question in Indiana is not only where a record sits but how the request itself will be classified on arrival.
| How the request is made | What it looks like to the agency | What the statute permits in response |
|---|---|---|
| A named person, purpose stated, one specific record | An identifiable requester with a declared purpose Answerable | Normal handling; a supplemental fee may still apply if the requester is out of state. |
| An Indiana resident, civic or personal purpose | The priority category the statute creates | May be moved ahead of other requests, provided the purpose is clearly stated. |
| An out-of-state commercial request | Outside the priority category | May be delayed to protect core agency functions, and may carry the supplemental fee. |
| An automated or scripted submission | A suspected automated request | Must be reported to the Public Access Counselor – but may not be denied on that ground alone. |
| Bulk extraction against a public portal | Suspected data scraping | May be denied outright, with notice to the counselor inside seven days. |
| A request that conceals or misstates who is asking | Suspected phishing, now defined in the statute | May be denied outright and reported. This is the line this firm holds anyway. |
| A party to live litigation re-asking its own discovery request | The only thing section 4(e) actually reaches | May be denied – but only where the requester is a party and is duplicating their own discovery. A non-party is outside the subsection. |
| A refusal you believe was wrong | A dispute with a public agency | A formal complaint to the Public Access Counselor, who issues a written opinion. |
| Any request touching a protected participant’s address | Not a records question at all | The substitute address is what the state supplies, and we do not go behind it. |
The Short Version
Indiana skip tracing is a county-by-county job: ninety-two counties, no central index, and since 1 July 2026, new rules for asking. House Enrolled Act 1360 amended the Access to Public Records Act, so an agency may screen requesters through a portal, check Indiana residency, put residents and stated civic or personal purposes first, delay and surcharge out-of-state and automated requests, and deny anything it suspects of data scraping or phishing, reporting it to the Public Access Counselor within seven days. Address Confidentiality Program addresses are substitutes, not homes. We work Indiana as an out-of-state commercial requester: public records and lawfully licensed data only, purposes stated truthfully, no automation aimed at an agency portal. General information, not legal advice.
Six Ways an Indiana Request Now Goes Wrong
Most of these are new since July, which is why older guidance will not warn you.
A Purpose Left Blank
Priority requires the purpose to be clearly stated. Saying nothing forfeits it even where it would have applied.
A Script Pointed at a Portal
Suspected scraping can be refused outright, and the refusal is reported to the state within seven days.
An Unbudgeted Supplemental Fee
Out-of-state and automated requests can carry a per-page and per-hour charge that did not exist before July.
Silence Mistaken for Refusal
Out-of-state requests may lawfully be delayed to protect core functions. Slow is not the same as denied.
A Denial Under Section 4(e) Taken at Face Value
It reaches only a party to the litigation re-asking their own discovery. A non-party’s request is outside it.
A Refusal Simply Accepted
Indiana has a Public Access Counselor who will rule on it in writing before you spend anything.
Ninety-Two Counties, and a State With No Single Centre
Counted from the federal file, and unusually evenly settled.
Filtering the Census Bureau’s 2020 national county file to Indiana returns ninety-two county-equivalents. Ninety-one carry class code H1 on the Bureau’s class-code list – the ordinary active county – and exactly one, Marion County, carries the code marking a county whose governmental functions belong to a municipal government. Marion is Indianapolis, and the consolidation there creates enough distinct problems that it has a page of its own: Indianapolis and Marion County.
What is striking about the other ninety-one is how evenly Indiana’s population sits across them. There is no single dominant metropolitan county in the way Illinois has Cook or Georgia has the Atlanta cluster. Indianapolis is the largest centre by a distance, but Fort Wayne, Evansville, South Bend, the Lafayette and Bloomington university towns, and the Indiana side of the Chicago and Louisville metropolitan areas are all substantial and all economically separate from one another. We cover the northeast on our Fort Wayne page.
What that does to a search
It means an Indiana file rarely has an obvious default county to start with. In states with one dominant metro, the sensible first guess is that an unaccounted-for person went there. In Indiana that guess is weak, because the plausible destinations are numerous and scattered, and a person leaving a small county may reasonably have gone to any of five or six regional centres or across a state line. That reorders the work when the task is locating a missing person rather than confirming an address somebody already has: with no default destination worth testing first, the productive move is to run the records that follow a person wherever they went – a recorded instrument, an estate file, a case that names them as a party – and let those name the county, rather than picking one and searching it thoroughly. When you do not know which of the ninety-two counties holds the record, you can open an Indiana file and we will run the records that follow a person, whichever county they landed in.
The state lines matter more here than the size of the state suggests. Indiana borders Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky and Illinois, and two of its significant population concentrations sit inside metropolitan areas centred in other states – the northwest looks to Chicago, and the southern edge across the Ohio River looks to Louisville. In both, a commute crosses a state line daily and a house move across it is unremarkable. Where a last known address sits near either, the neighbouring state is worked in the first pass rather than kept in reserve. Our general approach to placing somebody here is on the finding someone in Indiana page.
How an Indiana File Is Run Now
Four steps, two of which did not exist before July.
Identify Ourselves and State the Purpose
Every Indiana request names a real person and declares what it is for. The statute rewards a stated purpose and penalises an anonymous one, and it is the honest answer regardless.
Budget for the Position We Are Given
Out-of-state commercial requests may be delayed and surcharged. That expectation is set with you at the outset rather than reported as a surprise later in the file.
Ask Each Agency by Hand
No automation is directed at an Indiana agency or its portal. Requests go one at a time, narrowly framed, which is both the lawful route and the one that gets answered.
Distinguish Delayed From Denied
A slow response and a refusal are different outcomes with different remedies, and only one of them is worth taking to the Public Access Counselor. The report says which we are looking at.
The Substitute Address Behind Three Records You Would Otherwise Trust
Indiana routes protection through the Attorney General, and it reaches the records a locate leans on hardest.
The Office of the Indiana Attorney General runs the state’s Address Confidentiality Program. It is free, and eligibility covers seven categories: survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, harassment, intimidation, and invasion of privacy who fear for their safety. Every application contains a section that must be completed and signed by a trained victim’s advocate, so nobody enrols cold.
The office is unusually candid about what the programme is and is not: “It is not a witness protection program – or an absolute guarantee of safety. It is one more tool that victims can use to take back their lives.” That is a fair description and we would rather quote it than overstate the protection in either direction.
Here is the operational part that a records firm has to internalise. When somebody enrols, first-class mail goes to a secure substitute address and is forwarded onward – and the substitute address is also used for state and local government services, including driver’s licence, vehicle, voter and school registrations, and legal process.
Those are not marginal records. A driver’s licence address, a vehicle registration and a voter registration are three of the most heavily relied-upon identity records in any American locate, and in Indiana each of them may lawfully carry an address that is not where the person lives. An Indiana address drawn from those sources is therefore never self-verifying, and treating one as a confirmed residence is precisely the error that puts somebody in danger. We corroborate against a dated instrument before an Indiana address is reported as a residence, and we say which document dates it.
Requests that read as an attempt to reach a former partner, a person who has sought or holds protection, or somebody whose relocation appears calculated to open ground between them and the person enquiring, gets refused outright. Not trimmed to one county out of ninety-two. Not answered partially with a warning attached. Not referred to a firm that reads the question more loosely. No framing changes that, nor the reason volunteered with the request, nor the account offered of the relationship. And because the programme covers harassment, intimidation and invasion of privacy alongside the more obvious categories, the range of people it protects reaches well past the categories a reader would guess at – which is a reason for more caution on our side, not less.
If you are the person such a search would be looking for
You have reached the wrong firm, and telling you so is worth more than anything we could sell you. The Address Confidentiality Program is administered by the Indiana Attorney General and costs nothing to join; a trained victim’s advocate completes part of the application and can be found through Indiana victim services; and a protective order is something the court can issue or extend. This firm administers none of it and has no standing to counsel anyone on their own safety; nothing set out above is written as instruction for keeping an address out of reach.
What a court has already begun is a different question
This does not close off legitimate court business. Somebody holding an Indiana cause number, a named party and an attorney behind the request is completing a step a court set in motion, and Indiana itself contemplates that by routing legal process through the substitute address rather than requiring anybody to know where a participant lives. A request that route would satisfy was never a locating request; one it would not satisfy is asking for the thing the programme exists to withhold. Which has arrived is established in writing before an Indiana file is opened. What a creditor can actually reach once a person is located is general legal information and belongs with Indiana wage garnishment limits, while the enforcement mechanics sit with collecting an Indiana judgment.
Who Sends Us Indiana Work
Six recurring requests, and what the new statute does to each.
Attorneys on a Filing Clock
A stated purpose and a named requester, because delay is now lawful
Creditors With Paper
County recorder indexes, requested one office at a time
Servers With a Return Date
An address corroborated rather than taken from a registration
Families and Estates
Probate and land records across ninety-two separate counties
Lenders Holding a Balance
An obligation that already exists, not a decision still open
Owners After Move-Out
A departed tenant and a sum owed, never a screening decision
What an Indiana Report Commits To
An address taken from a driver’s licence, vehicle or voter record is labelled as coming from a source Indiana permits a protected participant to populate with a substitute address, and it is not presented as a residence until a dated instrument supports it. Where an agency delayed rather than refused, the report says delayed, because those carry different remedies and only one of them is worth escalating. Where a request was refused, the report gives the basis the agency stated. Every finding names the office it came from and the day it was read, and agencies not approached are listed as not approached. Public records and lawfully licensed data are the only inputs, purposes are stated to agencies truthfully, and no Indiana file is opened before its lawful reason is on paper. That has been the practice here since 2004.
Frequently Asked Questions
What changed in Indiana’s public records law in 2026?
House Enrolled Act 1360, signed on the fourth of March 2026 and effective the first of July, amended the Access to Public Records Act at Indiana Code 5-14-3. It passed ninety-five to nothing in the House and forty-eight to nothing in the Senate. It lets agencies run electronic portals that screen requests and check Indiana residency, give priority to residents and to civic, journalistic, academic or personal purposes, delay out-of-state and automated requests, charge a supplemental fee on those, deny requests suspected of data scraping or phishing or posing a cybersecurity risk, and – where the requester is a party to pending litigation and is duplicating their own discovery request in it – deny under section 4(e). That last ground is narrow: both conditions must be met, so a request from someone who is not a party to the litigation is outside it. The Public Access Counselor must be notified of suspicion-based denials.
Can an Indiana agency refuse a records request because it is automated?
No, and this is the most commonly misstated part of the new law. The Public Access Counselor’s own guidance says an agency does not have discretionary authority to deny a request solely because it is a suspected automated request. What automation does trigger is a mandatory report to the counselor, exposure to deprioritisation behind Indiana resident and non-commercial requests, and the supplemental fee. Outright denial requires something more specific: suspected data scraping, suspected phishing, or a request for electronic transmission that could expose or jeopardise the security of the agency’s systems or data.
Does Indiana charge more for out-of-state records requests?
It permits agencies to. Since July an agency may collect a supplemental fee when responding to an out-of-state request or an automated one. Under section 8(n) the fee must be reasonably related to the cost of fulfilling the request and may not exceed twenty-five cents per page and twenty-five dollars per hour of staff time spent processing it – the enacted cap is conjunctive, though the counselor’s overview paraphrases it disjunctively. Section 8(o) lets an agency waive it where the request serves the public interest. The additional expectation that an adopted fee be applied consistently to all out-of-state and automated requests is counselor guidance rather than statute. Agencies may also delay such requests as necessary to prevent disruption of their core functions, so cost is not the only consequence.
How does Indiana define data scraping and phishing?
Both are now defined in the records statute itself, which is new. Data scraping means use of an automated system to extract data from websites and other Internet accessible sources. Phishing means a method of obtaining information through fraud, where the sender hides or misrepresents who they are in order to trick the recipient into sharing information or granting access. Cybersecurity risk is deliberately left undefined.
What is the Indiana Public Access Counselor?
A standing state office that interprets and adjudicates public access to records and meetings, sitting between a requester and an agency so that a refusal need not go straight to court. It issues formal advisory opinions and informal opinions, accepts formal complaints when a request has been refused, publishes a Public Access Handbook and an annual report to the legislature, and maintains a searchable archive of past opinions. Since House Enrolled Act 1360 it also receives mandatory agency notices about suspicion-based denials and about suspected requests that were fulfilled anyway, publishes weekly complaint transparency reports, and tracks patterns tied to automation, phishing and data scraping across Indiana agencies.
Is an Indiana driver’s licence or voter address reliable?
Not on its own. The Attorney General’s Address Confidentiality Program supplies participants with a substitute address that is used for state and local government services including driver’s licence, vehicle, voter and school registrations and legal process. Those are among the identity records a locate normally leans on hardest – the driver’s licence, the vehicle registration and the voter registration most of all – and in Indiana any of them may lawfully carry an address that is not where the person lives. We therefore corroborate an Indiana address against a dated instrument before reporting it as a residence, and we say in the report which document dates it and how recently.
Who are you, and how is this work kept lawful in Indiana?
There is no surveillance, no doorstep enquiry and no cover story, and every approach to an Indiana clerk or recorder is one any member of the public could make in the same way.
Can you locate someone in Indiana’s Address Confidentiality Program?
No. The programme is run free of charge by the Office of the Indiana Attorney General for survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, stalking, human trafficking, harassment, intimidation and invasion of privacy who fear for their safety, and every application must be completed in part and signed by a trained victim’s advocate. First-class mail goes to a secure substitute address and is forwarded onward, and the substitute address is used for state and local government services and for legal process. The office describes it plainly as not a witness protection programme and not an absolute guarantee of safety, but one more tool. We do not work around any part of it.
Open an Indiana File
Send the name, any Indiana county or address ever connected to the person, and what the research has to achieve – the purpose matters more here than it did a year ago, because Indiana agencies may now ask for it and act on the answer. Requests go out under a named person with the purpose stated truthfully, one agency at a time and never through automation; the supplemental fee is budgeted rather than discovered; an address from a licence, vehicle or voter record is corroborated before it is called a residence; and a delay is reported as a delay rather than as a refusal. On a workable file the first read normally reaches you within 24 hours. Want to know whether Indiana will answer the question at all before you commit? Get in touch and we will tell you.
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