Companies House plans IT transformation
Improving the quality of data on the company register, a crackdown on overseas property owners and investment in IT systems are the priorities for Companies House in the next 12 months
Companies House plans to invest £23m in modernising IT provision, according to the corporate plan for 2022-23, stating that it will ‘continue to move away from legacy systems and improve existing customer journeys, as well as develop new services. For example, we want to introduce a new service for the appointment of directors and make further enhancements to the confirmation statement and insolvency services, which we hope to achieve, depending on the scale of change and prioritisation required for legislative reforms’.
Investment in technology through an ambitious transformation programme is designed to produce benefits for customers when filing online, with increased automation and further modernising the delivery of digital services. This will make services more intelligent and intuitive and will enable customers to get it right first time when engaging with services, helping to improve the compliance rates and quality of data held.
From April 2023, the new register for overseas entities will go live, requiring overseas based owners to register their property ownership and future purchases. This will provide more information for law enforcement to help them track down those using UK property as a money laundering vehicle, and sanctions will be introduced for non-compliance.
Entities who refuse to reveal their ‘beneficial owner’ will face restrictions on selling the property or land, and those who break the rules could face a fine of up to £2,500 per day or up to five years in prison.
Companies House will also be given new powers to verify and validate more data on the register, which will improve the accuracy of the data. It will also mean that it will be able to undertake more analysis as well as share information with others, in order to contribute even more to the fight against economic crime.
Lesley Cowley, chair of Companies House, said: ‘We welcome the measures set out in the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Act introduced in March 2022 and we’re keen to do all we can to play our part in tackling global economic crime and improving corporate transparency to prevent a wide range of illegality, including illicit finance and money laundering.
‘We’ve been clear about our ambition to do more to tackle economic crime and we’ve been actively involved in shaping the government’s plans over the last few years.
‘We also look forward to other new legislation being brought forward during the year within a further Economic Crime Bill, which will enhance our powers to query information, increase checks to verify identities, and introduce measures to improve the exchange of intelligence between Companies House and UK law enforcement bodies.’
Companies House is also facing problems with recruitment and says it will focus on attracting high quality talent to the organisation. It will also use creative advertising techniques to reach wider audiences during the recruitment process.
‘We’ll adapt and implement a refreshed reward and benefits package to reflect our new ways of working and labour market challenges. This will ensure our employee value proposition is competitive and help us to attract and retain the best talent,’ Companies House said.
It will also focus on staff training and development, launching a leadership and management development programme, and introducing ‘profession’ specific development interventions and a longer-term talent management approach, aligned to strategic workforce planning.
At the end of 2021, there were 4.8m companies on the register. During the year approximately 600,000 companies were incorporated. Altogether over 12.4m transactions supplying information were received and processed.