As Companies House’s new verification system gets delayed at the last minute, accountants and tax advisers will have a familiar feeling of uneasiness, writes Kevin Reed.
In a compliance-driven profession, accountants need more than just their clients to provide them with their right information; they also need the government’s systems and processes to be working adequately.
The drive to digitise tax filings is representative of technology as the silver bullet to improve government departments’ efficiency. And its success is decidedly patchy. For each multi-million online set of self-assessment tax returns there has been a Nirs2 or early Noughties NHS IT.
And so, efforts to bring Companies House into the 21st century have been welcomed – but with great trepidation. For, what has been viewed as a non-digitised dumping ground of unverified information, can it be transformed into a digital and verifiable source of secure companies and director data?
Companies House is introducing systems to verify the identity of directors and persons of significant control of UK companies. As part of that plan, agents will be able to register as an Authorised Corporate Services Provider (ACSP).
Being an ASCP, in the short-term, will enable an agent to verify clients’ ID on their behalf for Companies House. Further down the line, being an ASCP will see agents able to make filings on clients’ behalf to Companies House. Further details can be found here.
Sadly, the first stage was postponed at the last minute, due to ‘final testing’. The system is now scheduled to 'go live' on 18 March.
Accountants and tax advisers are used to government IT delays. Making Tax Digital, for example, has been ‘very close’ for several years. The other thing the profession knows is that these new systems don’t necessarily create efficiencies for either taxpayers or their agents.
While some may view the Companies House delay as ‘better than being introduced broken’, there is a familiar, chilly air that the delay has brought in - one that provides a wintry reminder of MTD delays of the recent past.
And, as Spring dawns on us and MTD ITSA still in beta testing, we can only hope that the new ACSP system beats it to go-live.
Kevin Reed is a freelance journalist and editor of Financial Accountant magazine
