checkSURE Companies House
Companies House and Fraud in 2008 – a Blast from the Past.
11th January 2008
The year starts with yet another “identity theft expert”, this time Danny Harrison, with the York-based consultancy CPP Group, announcing that company directors face an increased risk of identity fraud by being listed in Companies House. This expert notes that members of the public can access personal details of company directors such as name, address and date of birth, once they pay a fee to sign up to a service such as checkSURE.
As a corollary to their apparent findings on identity theft facilitated by Companies House information (which we have been noting here at checkSURE for years past), experts seem to be encouraging people who seek protection as directors of limited liability companies as registered at Companies House, to register their work addresses rather than home addresses.
Some are urging company directors to make use of the arrangement of the new Companies Act 2006, where any director will be able to request their home address to be withheld from Company House, However this change will not be implemented until October 2009. Directors can request that their work rather than their home address is listed, but must provide a legitimate reason (read excuse) for this to Company House. Of course, this legislation was enacted to protect directors like those at Huntingdon Life Sciences and the financial conglomerates supporting them who were being dogged (ged it?) by nutters taking ‘direct action’ against their companies, and threatening both their lives and those of their families.
Quite rightly though, fear of fraud is not considered a valid reason by Companies House for not giving your home address as a company director. In fact, it might seem counter-sensible - but this is a good thing. Companies House, the UK register of UK companies, includes information on several million limited companies and more than 300,000 new companies are incorporated each year. Although, this figure seems to fluctuate each time the Government has a budget. [Gordon Brown’s ludicrous – get on the bus, get off the bus – approach to taxes on entrepreneurialism caused sole traders to start companies and wind them up when he changed the rules eighteen months later. This doubled the workload on Companies House unnecessarily.] All of these companies can be searched for on the checkSURE system by our Users and the main ‘fraud’ issue that comes up again and again relates to the commercial behavior of company directors not identity theft.
Therefore it is essential that if individuals claim the legal sanctity of limited liability, so that if the company that they are company directors of goes bust and they have not obviously acted illegally such as by overtrading, creditors cannot lay claim to the personal assets and make them personally bankrupt, they can at least be properly identified by potential suppliers, customers and business partners. Encouraging company directors, with the exception of those whose lives are obviously in danger, from coughing up their personal details is akin to allowing Member of Parliament to stand for election under a pseudonym. It is most certainly against the interest of both the public and Companies House.
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