When did you last check yours?

How reliable really is the UK’s company register? Not very, it would seem.

A recent survey of 200 general counsels and company secretaries at large British businesses - each with revenue of at least £50 million - found that almost four in ten had uncovered discrepancies between what Companies House holds about them and their own records. One in five had already received a penalty or fine linked to inaccurate, incomplete or hard-to-reach information. The chief executive of the firm behind the research, reported in the Financial Times, called it “pervasive and systemic”.

The detail that matters is who was surveyed. These are not small businesses run from the kitchen table. They are large organisations with in-house legal teams, company secretaries and compliance budgets - and even they are finding that their own public record is wrong.

Why the register drifts

The reason is structural. Companies House is, for the most part, a self-reported register: it holds what companies tell it, and it is only as accurate as the company keeps it. Directors have a legal duty under the Companies Act 2006 to make sure both their own details and the company’s are correct and up to date. In practice that duty tends to fall to whoever has time - a founder, an office manager, a spreadsheet - and it slips. A director moves house and the register still shows the old address. A person with significant control changes and no one files the update. The company’s officers quietly diverge from reality.

Why it is surfacing now

For years, little of this had any consequence. That has changed. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, Companies House now has real powers to query, challenge and reject filings - after an era in which people were able to register as directors under entirely fictitious names. And identity verification is forcing a reckoning. As directors verify who they are, the mismatches between the register and reality come to the surface: Companies House says more than 75,000 personal-data corrections have already been made since verification began. For many companies, getting ready for identity verification is the moment they discover their filings are wrong.

The deadline that actually bites

If you are a director, the timing is close. Identity verification became mandatory for new directors in November 2025, and existing directors have a transition period that ends on 18 November 2026. But the date that will catch most companies is earlier than that: you need to be verified by the time your next confirmation statement is due, because an unverified director blocks the statement from being filed. Miss it and you are not merely untidy - you are unable to meet a statutory filing.

The hidden cost

There is a quieter cost too. Keeping the register right is a manual job, and a surprisingly heavy one. Two-thirds of the companies in the survey said it would take them thirteen hours or more simply to produce an exact count of the legal entities in their group. For a smaller company the volume is lower, but the exposure is the same - and it usually rests on one person who has a day job to do as well.

What to do

None of this is hard to fix; it is a matter of attention. Three things are worth doing now:

• Check your record against reality. Pull your company’s page on Companies House and confirm the directors, registered office, people with significant control, SIC codes and addresses actually match.
• Get your directors verified ahead of your confirmation statement, not on the deadline.
• Keep it current from here. Accuracy is not a one-off clean-up; it is a filing you have to maintain.

This is precisely the work an outsourced company secretary takes off your desk: keeping your entry on the register accurate, handling identity verification, and making sure every filing is correct and on time. If you would like us to check your record and get you ready before your next confirmation statement, email enquiry@firstcosec.co.uk.