Companies House identity checks become mandatory for directors
New rules under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act require directors and people with significant control to verify their identity, reshaping day-to-day incorporation work.
Identity verification at Companies House has moved from a voluntary scheme to a hard legal requirement, marking the most significant shift in incorporation practice for a generation. Under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act, directors and people with significant control must now confirm who they are before their details can sit on the register, a change the government has framed as central to its wider drive against fraud and shell-company abuse.
The reforms hand Companies House powers it has never held before. The registrar can now query, challenge and reject information that looks suspicious, rather than acting as a passive filing cabinet for whatever is submitted. Firms that advise on company formations have spent months preparing clients for the transition, and many report that the practical burden has landed on corporate and company secretarial teams rather than on litigators.
For law firms, the immediate work has been procedural. Authorised corporate service providers must register with Companies House and complete their own checks before they can verify clients, and practitioners say the verification step is now being built into standard onboarding alongside anti-money-laundering due diligence. Advisers have warned that overseas directors and complex ownership chains will take longer to clear, and that transactions with tight timetables need to factor the process in early.
Compliance specialists have broadly welcomed the direction of travel, arguing that a cleaner register benefits legitimate business by making it harder to hide behind opaque structures. Others caution that the value of the reforms will depend on enforcement, and that a verification tick does little on its own unless Companies House uses its new powers to act on the discrepancies it uncovers.
The register underpins a vast amount of commercial and lending activity, and firms expect the changes to feed through into diligence practice across the market. For now, the message from advisers to clients is simple: verify early, keep records, and assume that filings will face far more scrutiny than they once did.