Companies House has just published its business plan which includes an outline of what it plans to deliver from April 2024 to March 2025. The plan details Companies House’s strategic goals, key activities, targets and financial forecasts..
The business plan includes an outline of what Companies House plans to deliver in relation to the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023. It emphasises Companies House’s commitment to ensuring the integrity and accuracy of information held on the Companies House public record, as well as reducing fraud and money laundering.
Key aspects of the business plan which seek to increase transparency and veracity are as follows:
| • | Information. Prioritise cleaning up existing information on registers by identifying and removing information known to be inaccurate. Query and reject information, where the information is clearly false, misleading or suspicious. Expedite striking off companies, where Companies House has evidence of fraudulent information. Require companies confirm that they being formed for a lawful purpose at incorporation, with an annual confirmation of that continued lawful purpose. |
| • | Addresses. Require companies to provide a registered email address and an appropriate registered office address. Stop the use of PO boxes (and equivalent services) as an appropriate registered office address by the end of March 2025. Act against companies that do not have an appropriate office address or that use an address that has been hijacked. |
| • | ACSPs. Introduce a registration process for third party agents to become authorised corporate service providers. |
| • | Identity Verification. Develop the significant changes to Companies House systems and service integrations necessary for identity verification. Have the technical capability to verify an individual’s identity by the end of March 2025. This begins the process for a phased roll out from Spring 2025. |
| • | Corporate directors. Begin to develop process changes to impose limits on the use of corporate directors as set out under the Small Business Enterprise and Employment Act 2015. |
| • | Personal information. Investigate where personal information has been used without consent. Develop processes to enable the suppression of personal information from the register, including suppression of the company’s registered office address, if it is a person’s residential address. Enable changes to allow people who are personally at risk (rather than at risk due to the activities of the company) to apply for protection of their information. |
| • | Intelligence assessment. Develop a strategic intelligence assessment, alongside partners, to identify and assess strategic threats posed to the UK through misuse of corporate structures. This will be followed by a control strategy and series of action plans to detail how Companies House, with its partners, will focus activities to act in response to those threats. Establish further relationships and memorandums of understanding with law enforcement and intelligence agencies to share data and intelligence, enabling a multi-agency disruption approach to tackling economic crime.
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For further details on the information above, please contact Harender Branch at hkb@branchaustinmccormick.com
Branch Austin McCormick LLP
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London
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