A thirty-page report is the right deliverable for the person who has to defend the decision. It is the wrong one for the person who has ten minutes to make it. The score exists for the second reader, and it is a summary of the report, never a substitute for it.
Every Argus report ends with a number between 0 and 100, together with the reasoning behind it. This article explains what the number is composed of, how the bands map to decisions, what it deliberately excludes, and why a legally spotless company can score badly.
A due diligence report is a long document by necessity: register extracts, source citations, ownership chains, analyst commentary. Counsel can work through it and should. A chief executive or finance director deciding whether to release an advance payment often cannot, and the practical result is that a careful report gets skimmed and its conclusion gets lost.
The score compresses the report into something that survives being forwarded. It does not replace the document underneath it — the reasoning has to remain readable, because the number on its own is not evidence of anything.
Five blocks, weighted by their power to change a decision rather than by how much material each one produces. Weightings shift with the type of check; the distribution below is the standard corporate one.
| Block | Weight | What is examined |
|---|---|---|
| Ownership structure | 25% | Beneficial owners resolved to natural persons, nominee arrangements, offshore layers, transit jurisdictions |
| Sanctions exposure | 25% | OFAC, EU, UN and UK designations, Ukrainian sanctions data, exposure at ownership level rather than entity level |
| Legal status | 20% | Registration and current standing, seizures, encumbrances, liquidation or insolvency proceedings |
| Financial condition | 15% | Judgment debts, enforcement proceedings, patterns in litigation history |
| Reputation | 15% | Media record, investigative databases, connected controversies, public conduct |
Ownership and sanctions together carry half the weight, and that is deliberate. They are the two blocks where a wrong answer is least recoverable: a payment to a party exposed through its ownership chain does not become undone by good financials elsewhere in the file.
| Band | Reading | What it implies |
|---|---|---|
| 0–30 | High risk | Do not contract without additional guarantees or a full legal review |
| 31–60 | Medium risk | Open questions remain; deepen the check or add protective contract terms |
| 61–80 | Acceptable | Reasonably reliable; standard terms suit most transactions |
| 81–100 | Low risk | No adverse findings across the parameters examined |
The bands are decision thresholds, not grades. The distinction that matters is between the middle two: a 58 and a 64 are not meaningfully different measurements, but they sit either side of the point where the recommended response changes from asking more questions to proceeding on normal terms.
This is the part that surprises people, so it is worth an example. The case below is anonymised; the sequence is as it ran.
A client asked for a check on a distributor in Turkiye. The company was lawfully registered, in good standing, and absent from every sanctions list screened. On the face of it, clean. The score came back at 22 out of 100.
Three findings drove it. The founder had previously directed a company that supplied equipment to a plant in Russia until 2023. The new company was incorporated roughly four months after sanctions landed on the earlier structure. And the registered address was shared with three other legal entities, none of which had any public activity at all.
Individually, each of those is explicable. Together they describe a recognisable pattern, and none of them is a list hit. The client declined the deal. This is what the score is built to surface: risk that is real, documented and entirely invisible to a name-matching screen.
Three exclusions, stated plainly because a score that is trusted for things it does not cover is worse than no score.
It is not a credit rating. It says nothing about ability or willingness to pay. A financially strong company with a concealed ownership chain scores badly; a modest but transparent one scores well. The question being answered is whether the counterparty is who it presents itself to be.
It does not carry sector-specific regulatory weighting. Pharmaceutical, financial services and defence-adjacent supply each carry licensing and compliance requirements that a general corporate check does not assess.
It is not a substitute for legal or financial audit. Where a transaction runs past roughly a million dollars or establishes a long-term dependency, a deeper report with full relationship mapping is the appropriate instrument, and counsel should read the underlying document rather than the summary.
The score is a compression of a documented report into a number a decision-maker will actually read, weighted so that ownership and sanctions — the two irreversible categories — carry half of it. It is designed to be defensible when someone opens the report behind it, which is the only test that matters. Read the band for the decision, and the reasoning for the reason.
Related reading: what a documented check costs at each depth, in how much a counterparty check costs, and what a report has to contain to hold up later, in due diligence evidence standards.
Every report closes with an Argus Score and the reasoning behind it, so the decision-maker gets a number and counsel gets the document underneath. Basic Check from $149, Standard Report from $349.