Companies House is flexing its muscles

As we have reported previously, one of the key aims of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act is to improve the accuracy and quality of the data on Companies House registers.

Under the new legislation, Companies House has enhanced powers to query information that appears to be incorrect or inconsistent with information held.

It is the intention that over time this will improve the accuracy and integrity of the information on the register and safeguard against misleading or unlawful activity.

What we can expect

In the coming months we are going to see a number of changes to the scope of information that Companies House requires about your company. In a recent post, the registrar confirmed that improving the quality of the data held on their registers would be their next target for improvement. They said:

“We can now take a more robust approach to dealing with information that’s been provided to us by querying information and requesting supporting evidence.

“We’ll remove information if it’s inaccurate, incomplete, false or fraudulent. We’ll use annotations on the register to let users know about potential issues with the information that’s been supplied to us.

“We’re also taking steps to clean up the register, using data matching to identify and remove inaccurate information. We have more powers to share information with law enforcement agencies and other government departments.”

The new requirement has teeth

Companies House have confirmed that you must respond quickly when asked for more information so that they can decide the next steps. If your case escalates to a formal query for information and you still do not respond, this will be considered a criminal offence and there could be serious consequences including a financial penalty, an annotation on the company’s record or prosecution.