Ireland Registration of a Business Name by an Individual (Form RBN1)

This file is the source-review record for this document version, per the manual-source-review-v1 practice. It documents the provenance of the published fields and flow and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

• status: draft
• verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
• verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-21

The document was derived directly from the official Form RBN1 PDF's own text content, but the full field-by-field comparison the practice requires (manual-source-review-v1 → Procedure step 2) has not yet been completed against the live CRO filing channel (RBN1 is a paper/postal form with no online-filing screens to compare against — see "Path to a verified claim" below). It therefore remains draft, not verified.

Why this schema and why now (GOV-4178, GOV-4176)

GOV-4176 is the recurring "GovSchema Standard Research" cycle. Ireland already has a published Business Formation schema, ie/cro/company-incorporation (Form A1, incorporating a new private company limited by shares), but that document's own VERIFICATION.md and CATALOG.md both record that Ireland's individual/sole-trader business-name registration (CRO Form RBN1) was a known, still-open companion gap — the same category of pairing this registry has built for other jurisdictions (company incorporation alongside sole-trader/ business-name registration, e.g. lv/ur/sole-trader-registration-kr2 next to Latvia's incorporation schema). A prior cycle (recorded in CATALOG.md around ca/on/registration/business-incorporation) had screened cro.ie for RBN1 specifically and found the entire domain behind a Cloudflare JavaScript challenge that blocks both direct fetch and a real headless-browser networkidle wait, and pivoted to Ontario instead, leaving Ireland's RBN1 banked as backlog. This cycle found a working, unauthenticated static mirror of the same official form (see below), unblocking it.

Sources examined

• Document (id, version): ie/cro/business-name-registration-individual / 1.0.0
• Spec version: GovSchema 0.3.0
• Authority: Companies Registration Office (CRO), Ireland.
• Primary source URL: https://www.dlrceb.ie/_fileupload/Downloads/rbn1.pdf — a copy of CRO's own Form RBN1 hosted, unauthenticated, by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Enterprise Board (a public local enterprise office, dlrceb.ie), fetched directly this cycle: HTTP 200, application/pdf, 17,660 bytes. cro.ie itself (which hosts an equivalent RBN1 PDF under its own /-/media/ path) returns a Cloudflare JavaScript-challenge interstitial to both a direct fetch and this environment's headless-browser tooling from this environment, the same class of block already recorded against it in ie/cro/company-incorporation's own VERIFICATION.md; the dlrceb.ie mirror was used instead as an independent, unauthenticated distribution of the identical official document.
• Retrieval / extraction method: the PDF's raw bytes were retrieved (not a third-party summary — the fetch tool's own text-summarization step explicitly could not decode the file's compressed content streams and said so). The document's 3 /Page objects (/Kids [ 15 0 R 1 0 R 4 0 R ]) were confirmed directly from the file's cross-reference structure. Every FlateDecode content stream was independently decompressed with zlib, and every Tj/TJ text-showing operator in each stream was walked in document order, tracking each operator's Tm/Td/TD text-matrix operands to recover the x/y position of every field label and every one of the form's 8 numbered explanatory notes. This let each note be matched to its correct field by physical proximity (the note markers are small cross-reference tags printed near, but not always immediately after, their field's label in the content stream's own drawing order), rather than assumed from the notes' printed reading order on the notes page. No external secondary source was used or needed — RBN1's own printed notes are self-contained.
• Official form id: Form RBN1 ("Registration of Business Name by an individual"), issued under section 4 of the Registration of Business Names Act 1963.
• Retrieved / reviewed: 2026-07-21.
• Reviewer: GovSchema Engineering (Standards Engineer), initial authoring source-review.

What was confirmed against the source

Every field/note mapping below was independently re-derived from the raw content-stream text and its coordinate data (see "Retrieval / extraction method"), not read off the notes' printed order:

| Source label | Note | Field(s) | |---|---|---| | Business name | note one | businessName | | Other business name(s) under which this business is conducted | — (no numbered note attached) | otherBusinessNames | | Nature of business | note two | natureOfBusinessDescription | | Principal place of business | note three | principalPlaceOfBusinessAddress | | Date of adoption of business name | note four | dateOfAdoption | | Surname / Forename(s) / Former surname(s) / Former forename(s) | note six (referenced twice, once per column) | applicantSurname, applicantForenames, applicantFormerSurnames, applicantFormerForenames | | Residential address | — (no numbered note attached) | applicantResidentialAddress | | Business occupation | — (no numbered note attached) | applicantBusinessOccupation | | Nationality | — (no numbered note attached) | applicantNationality | | Directorship(s) — Company name / Company number | note seven | applicantDirectorshipCompanyName, applicantDirectorshipCompanyNumber | | Presenter details (Name/Address/Telephone number/Fax number/Email/DX number/DX exchange/Reference number) | note five | presenterName, presenterAddress, presenterTelephoneNumber, presenterFaxNumber, presenterEmail, presenterDxNumber, presenterDxExchange, presenterReferenceNumber | | Certification declaration + Signature | note eight | certificationDeclarationConfirmed | | Name in block letters or typescript | — (no numbered note attached) | certificationNameInBlockLetters | | Date (certification) | — (no numbered note attached) | certificationDate |

The two general, unnumbered form-wide instructions — "Where 'not applicable', 'nil' or 'none' is appropriate, please state" and the continuation-sheet instruction for when the printed space is inadequate — were read but are not modelled as data fields; they describe how to fill in the form's other fields, not data of their own.

Scope narrowing and why

• Address fields are modelled as single free-text strings, not line1/line2/town/county sub-fields. Unlike ie/cro/company-incorporation's Form A1, whose source separately labels a registered office's address lines, Form RBN1 prints its Principal place of business, Residential address, and Presenter details — Address fields each as one ruled, multi-line writing box under a single label, with no internal sub-labels. This document follows the source form's own actual layout rather than imposing the sibling schema's line1/line2 convention where the source itself doesn't split the field — precision over cross-schema consistency where the two source forms genuinely differ.
• applicantDirectorshipCompanyName/applicantDirectorshipCompanyNumber are flat, non-repeating fields, even though their source boxes are tall enough to list more than one directorship. GovSchema v0.3 fields have no array/repeating-group construct (GSP-0009 tracks a future addition), so — consistent with this registry's established precedent for repeatable source blocks (e.g. ie/cro/company-incorporation's single-director scoping) — only one directorship pair is modelled; see the field descriptions for the disclosure.
• Form RBN1A (partnership applicant), Form RBN1B (body corporate applicant), Form RBN2 (amendment of registered particulars), and Form RBN3 (cessation of a registered business name) are all distinct CRO forms referenced on RBN1's own "Further information"/"Changes" page but are entirely out of scope of this document, which models Form RBN1 (the individual applicant's initial registration) only.
• Office-use-only fields (the CRO-assigned Business Number and the CRO receipt date stamp) are server/back-office assigned, not applicant input, and are excluded — consistent with this registry's general boundary.
• The prescribed fee (referenced only via "please make the fee payable to the Companies Registration Office" and a further-information note that the fee amount is available from www.cro.ie or info@cro.ie, with neither the amount itself printed on the form) is payment metadata, not applicant- collected data, consistent with how this registry treats fees elsewhere (e.g. ie/cro/company-incorporation).
• The signature itself is modelled as a boolean declaration (certificationDeclarationConfirmed), not as file/image data, following this registry's established convention for wet-ink signature requirements (cf. ie/cro/company-incorporation's formA1WetSignatureConfirmed).

What is NOT yet independently verified

• Which presenter sub-fields are truly mandatory. Note five states that the presenter section "must be completed by the person who is presenting the application form," but does not itself state which of the eight presenter sub-fields (name, address, telephone, fax, email, DX number, DX exchange, reference number) are individually mandatory versus optional alternative contact channels. This document marks presenterName and presenterAddress required and the remaining six optional, by analogy with this registry's ng/cac/cac-1-1-application-for-registration-of-company precedent (whose source form does print an explicit mandatory/optional split for its own presenter block) rather than from an explicit marking on RBN1 itself — flagged here for a future reviewer to confirm against a version of the form with visible required-field markers (this specimen's print layout does not use asterisks or similar markers anywhere on the form, unlike, e.g., Malta's Jobsplus engagement form).
• Whether any field on this form is itself marked mandatory by an asterisk or similar convention. This RBN1 specimen prints no asterisks or "*" markers next to any label (confirmed by the absence of any * glyph in the decompressed text streams for the field-label sections). Required/optional judgments in this document are therefore derived from each note's own wording (e.g. "where applicable" for directorships) or, absent an explicit note, from whether the underlying fact is one every registrant must have (e.g. a business name, a principal place of business) versus one that may genuinely not apply (e.g. other business names, former names, a directorship).
• Online/CORE filing screen order and wording. RBN1 is presented on cro.ie as a downloadable PDF for postal/hand delivery, not as an online CORE filing screen (unlike Form A1); this review did not find, and does not assert the existence of, an online RBN1 filing flow to cross-check the steps[] grouping against. The steps[] order instead mirrors the printed form's own page layout (business/trade details, then the individual applicant, then presenter details, then certification).
• The exact byte-identity of the cro.ie-hosted RBN1 PDF against this cycle's dlrceb.ie mirror. Both are represented as the same official form, but cro.ie itself could not be fetched this cycle to confirm a byte-for-byte match; a future reviewer with access to a Cloudflare-challenge workaround should re-confirm the two are identical (or note any revision).

Mock test run (phase 4)

Two realistic payloads and one deliberately invalid payload were checked field-by-field against every field's type/required/validation rule and steps[].fields referential completeness (every field appears in exactly one step; no step references an undeclared field), using an independently hand-written mock validator (not the registry's shared tools/validate.mjs, to cross-check it independently).

1. Sole trader with no other business names, no former names, no directorships, and a full presenter contact set — an individual registering a single trading name, principal place of business in Dublin, date of adoption given, all core fields populated, all optional fields (otherBusinessNames, applicantFormerSurnames, applicantFormerForenames, applicantDirectorshipCompanyName, applicantDirectorshipCompanyNumber, and all six optional presenter sub-fields) omitted. Result: valid.
2. Individual with a former surname (a married woman's previous surname), a directorship of another company, and a presenter acting on the applicant's behalf via a document exchange service — exercises applicantFormerSurnames, applicantDirectorshipCompanyName + applicantDirectorshipCompanyNumber together, and presenterDxNumber/presenterDxExchange together, with a presenter distinct from the individual applicant. Result: valid.
3. Deliberately invalid payload — an empty businessName (fails minLength: 1), a natureOfBusinessDescription of "" (fails minLength: 1), missing principalPlaceOfBusinessAddress (fails required), missing applicantSurname and applicantForenames (fail required), a presenterName omitted while presenterAddress is given (fails required on presenterName), and certificationDeclarationConfirmed omitted (fails required). Result: correctly rejected — all 7 induced errors were caught independently.

All three payloads were also checked against schema.json's steps array: every field is reachable from steps[0] through next chaining, and no field is orphaned from a step.

Path to a verified claim (next step)

To advance to status: verified, a reviewer applies manual-source-review-v1 (Procedure step 2) against a cro.ie-hosted copy of Form RBN1 directly (once a Cloudflare-challenge workaround is available), confirms it is byte-identical (or notes any revision) to the dlrceb.ie mirror used here, resolves the two open items above (presenter sub-field mandatoriness; absence of any asterisk convention on this specimen), resolves any discrepancy by shipping a new schema version (immutability — VERSIONING §3), and records the outcome here plus sets status: verified with a current verification.lastVerifiedAt/nextReviewBy.

Re-verification

Per the practice's Cadence, nextReviewBy is set to 2027-01-21 (6 months). Re-check the source on or before that date and on any source.url change.