The Treasury Committee of the House of Commons has reported this morning on economic crime in the UK. It thinks Companies House a major weakness in this regard, saying:
There must be no weak areas in the UK's systems for preventing economic crime. At present, Companies House presents such a weakness. The UK cannot extol the virtue of a public register of beneficial ownership and yet not carry out the necessary rigorous checks of the information on that register. The Government must urgently consider reform of Companies House to ensure it has the statutory duties and powers to ensure it plays no role in helping those undertaking economic crime, whether here or abroad. It is welcome that the Economic Secretary has noted that BEIS is considering reform in this area, but the Government should move quickly and now publish detail of this reform by summer 2019.
They are right.
First, all accounts have too be on public record. I lay out my reasoning this morning. There can be no excuses. And no ifs and buts. It has to be one rule for all. And those accounts must be the full, meaningful, information that has to be supplied to shareholders, which is itself in need of much improvement.
Second, Companies House must now verify the data that it posts. There is an easy way to do this. It should be a requirement that all UK banks should supply data on all the companies that they supply services to in the UK specifying who they think the beneficial owners and directors are, and what the annual sums deposited in the accounts they manage is. The aim is to make banks take their obligations seriously; to provide verification for Companies House data and to ensure that companies with activity who do not comply with filing requirements can be identified and pursued.
There is no excuse for not doing this now. But I am sure one will be found.
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Agreed wholeheartedly.
In my time working with organisations listed at CH, we have on a number of occasions come a cropper as what information was submitted was totally at odds with what we experienced or later found out.
Companies House is a disaster.
The trouble is it is not a regulator at all
The result is that UK company law is wholly unregulated
Even the apparently intellectually challenged Theresa May added the caveat to the supremacy of capitalist enterprises in a market society that effective regulation was essential.
Without effective regulation we have a free-for-all. That is no sort of level playing field for legitimate enterprises.
My post, for reasons unknown, simply vanished when I scrolled down to check for typos etc. It’s not the first time this has happened since
recent changes behind the scenes and I really can’t bothered t try and recreate it at this late hour. While I’m in beefing mode, why does the system sometimes allow correction of missed letters, misspellings etc and at others it will overwrite existing text when insertions/corrections are made (as it’s been doing to me just now)? It’s also now bringing up my postal address below the reply box, which didn’t happen before the changes, and I certainly don’t want that to appear in my posts. Indeed, in combination, with the above problems, I’ve lost text in the reply box and my postal address has appeared in its place.
It’s all a bit clunky and I may drop out for a bit until things get sorted,
Ken
I am sorry: I have no idea
My suggestion is write off line and copy in
I often do, using a very simple programme like IA Writer to do so
I will be updating WordPress again soon – maybe the problem will go away then
Richard
Ken Mathieson says:
“It’s all a bit clunky and I may drop out for a bit until things get sorted,”
I’m not noticing any difference or having anything odd happening.
For someone who spends hours tapping away on it I know amazingly little about computers , but unless other folk are experiencing similar problems it could be the problem is at your end (?)
I’d be inclined to blame Micros**t. Everytime they did an automatic update on mine funny things happened. Nothing major but for example the update would completely rearrange my desktop icons 😐 It’s why I don’t use their platform any longer and have gone back to using Linux Mint which I had years ago. It behaves.
[…] on extrapolation of tax return audits and not data for the economy as a whole, and the cheats (which will very often be companies registered in the UK without any evidence of their owners being …) simply do not appear in the HMRC […]