Cracking Down on Corporate Crime: ECCTA in Action
3 Jul 2025
2 min read
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Companies House is officially underway with taking positive steps to combat economic crime and promote corporate transparency.
Earlier this week, the government published its second progress report on implementing aspects of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA). Significantly, Companies House has taken the following actions since it has been bestowed with its new powers:
- Required companies to change their registered office address (e.g. for those with PO boxes or for fraudulent reasons) to a suitable address, with the view to striking off those companies if they fail to provide an appropriate address.
- Queried and removed false, misleading, or incorrect information from the registers.
- Rejected and/or monitored suspicious submissions by utilising new system improvements and analytical techniques.
- Implemented financial penalties for the worst offending companies who have filed their confirmation statements too late.
Aside from aiming to reduce the likelihood of economic crime from the fraudulent misuse of UK companies, there are significant benefits to the register being more closely monitored to better ensure that those details displayed on the public record are accurate (even if those errors were made accidentally). Such measures will help to ensure that the details on the register are more reliable and paint a clearer picture of a company, assisting your due diligence on the companies you are dealing with.
These interventions have not only made a real difference to impacted individuals and members of the public who may have has their details misused, but are also an important step in improving the accuracy of the company register and disrupting economic crime. They have also helped to reduce the risk of harm to businesses and to government organisations, by reducing the risk of fraud.