The Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 (ECCTA) is the biggest reform of the Companies House regime in more than a generation. Its provisions have been phased in across 2024, 2025, and 2026. By the middle of 2026, most of the headline measures are live or well under way.
The combined effect is easy to state. Companies House is far less of a passive registry now. It is far more of an active gatekeeper.
That shift lands on the firms that file for clients. Identity verification, the registered email duty, tougher powers to query and reject filings, and wider information sharing all change how a filing is prepared, submitted, and recorded.
This insight piece sets out where the regime sits in 2026, what is still being phased in, and what it means in practice for firms that file at volume.
ECCTA in seven changes
Seven changes account for most of the new work. Each one is covered in its own section below.
- Identity verification for directors, PSCs, and other relevant individuals
- A registered email address held by every company
- Stronger registrar powers to query, reject, annotate, and remove filings
- Wider information sharing with HMRC, the National Crime Agency, and the FCA
- New rights to suppress certain personal details from the public register
- Higher filing fees across incorporations, confirmation statements, and re-registrations
- A parallel reform of limited partnerships
Identity verification for directors and PSCs
The headline reform is identity verification. People who file at Companies House now have to prove who they are.
The duty covers directors, persons with significant control, members of LLPs, and others identified in the Act. Each of them can verify directly with Companies House, or through an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP).
The regime is being phased in across 2025 and 2026. New incorporations need verified directors and PSCs from the relevant commencement date.
Existing companies work to a different clock. They must verify their relevant individuals by their next confirmation statement filing date after the regime applies. By the end of the implementation window, every person filing at Companies House will hold a verified identity on the register.
Authorised Corporate Service Providers (ACSPs)
Accountancy firms, law firms, and similar professional service providers file at Companies House on behalf of clients. Those firms can register as ACSPs.
ACSP status lets the firm verify the identity of its clients' relevant individuals as part of its existing AML customer due diligence work. Companies House then accepts that verification, so the individual never has to deal with the registry directly.
For firms with significant filing volumes, ACSP registration is close to mandatory. Without it, every client director and PSC has to run a separate verification with Companies House. That adds friction to onboarding and to every filing after it.
With it, the firm's existing AML workflow delivers verification as a by-product of CDD.
The registered email obligation
Since March 2024, every company has had to maintain a registered email address with Companies House. The address is not published on the public register.
Companies House uses it for official communications, including reminders, queries, and statutory notices.
A common failure in 2026 is a personal director email address that later changes or goes inactive. The notice is sent, and nobody reads it.
Best practice is a firm-managed email alias. The firm receives the message and forwards it to the right party. Statutory notices then still land, even when the client's own email arrangements change.
Strengthened registry powers
ECCTA gives Companies House much stronger powers over what reaches the register. Four of them shape everyday filings:
- Require more information where a filing appears incorrect
- Refuse to register documents that do not meet the proper delivery requirements
- Annotate a filing on the register
- Remove information from the register where it should not be there
The firms that have felt this most are the ones filing routine confirmation statements and incorporations.
Three things commonly trigger a registrar query: a generic SIC code, a registered office address that appears suspicious, and PSC information that is inconsistent with the prior filing.
Filings that once went through without comment may now need extra support or a correction.
Information sharing with other authorities
Companies House can now share information much more widely, with UK and international authorities alike. That includes HMRC, the National Crime Agency, and the FCA.
The objective is to detect economic crime earlier, by letting data flow between the registry and the agencies that act on it.
For practitioners, this is mainly a background change rather than a workflow change. The practical point is narrow. A client whose Companies House file does not match their HMRC file may now face questions that would not have arisen before.
Suppression of personal information
ECCTA gives individuals stronger rights to suppress certain personal information from the public register. Residential addresses are the main case, especially where disclosure could pose a risk.
Companies House runs the application process, and the criteria are set out in published guidance.
For most firms, the relevant cases are narrow. They involve directors at credible risk of personal harm, or directors with a documented history of harassment. These applications are not common.
Where one does apply, help the client through the process. Then file consistently once the suppression takes effect.
Filing fee changes
Companies House raised its filing fees sharply in May 2024 to fund the expanded role of the registry under ECCTA. Incorporation fees, confirmation statement fees, and re-registration fees all rose.
Where filings are billed on a pass-through basis, the increase is a recurring cost for the client. Where they are absorbed into a fixed monthly fee, it is a margin item instead.
Either way, update your client billing to reflect the current fee schedule. Where the firm pays confirmation statement fees and rebills them, the rebilled line should track the live Companies House charge, not a static figure carried over from prior years.
Limited Partnership reform
A parallel set of reforms applies to limited partnerships registered under the Limited Partnerships Act 1907. Under the new rules, a limited partnership must:
- Have a registered office in the same part of the UK as its formation jurisdiction
- Use an ACSP for filings, or maintain a verified principal place of business
- Submit periodic confirmation statements, in the same way companies do
Firms with limited partnership clients should review each partnership against the new requirements. Failure to comply can trigger Companies House strike-off proceedings for the partnership. That carries consequences for the partners, and for any investment structures sitting underneath.
Workflow implications for practitioners
Put the changes together and the firm's workflow has to handle four touchpoints that did not exist five years ago:
- Identity verification for relevant individuals
- Registered email management
- The registrar's query and rejection regime
- Periodic re-verification of identity status
Each one is straightforward in isolation. Together, they add real work behind what still looks like a simple confirmation statement or incorporation.
The practical fix is to fold these ECCTA duties into the AML and engagement management workflow you already run, rather than tracking them as a parallel job. In practice that means three habits:
- Identity verification done as part of CDD covers the Companies House requirement
- The registered email is set during onboarding and reviewed at each confirmation statement
- Registrar queries route to the engagement manager, not to the partner's inbox
How Accupe handles ECCTA-affected workflows
Accupe is built for firms operating under the current Companies House regime. The ECCTA workload runs through the parts of the platform a firm already uses daily, from Companies House filings and KYC identity verification through to Compliance Radar, Smart Boards, and e-signatures.
Here is what each of those parts does:
- The Companies House API integration auto-populates filings
- KYC identity verification produces the evidence an ACSP submission needs
- The encrypted client portal handles secure document exchange
- Compliance Radar tracks identity verification status next to the rest of the per-client risk profile
- Smart Boards surface confirmation statement deadlines before they bite
- AI document analysis reads supporting paperwork and cites its sources
- E-signatures handle director sign-offs, with no extra subscription
For firms managing volume under the ECCTA regime, the operational layer decides the outcome. It is the difference between scaling smoothly and absorbing recurring failure costs.
