Hiding in Plain Sight: The Professionals Keeping British Business Honest

Nobody thanks the person who made sure the fire exits were clear. Until there’s a fire.

That’s a reasonable metaphor for what company secretarial professionals do inside accountancy practices, day after day. They file the confirmation statement before the deadline. They maintain the PSC register accurately. They ensure the company’s statutory books reflect reality. They check that the registered office address is legitimate, the share allotments properly recorded, the minutes properly kept.

Nobody outside the practice notices. Clients rarely ask. Directors seldom dwell on it. And yet, without this work — done meticulously, repeatedly, and largely in silence — the entire system of UK corporate governance starts to unravel at the edges.

At Inform Direct, Bright’s Company Secretarial software, we notice. We’ve built a company around supporting this work, and the more closely we look at it, the more we believe it deserves far greater recognition than it currently receives.

You’re not just serving clients. You’re serving the public interest.

Here’s something that rarely makes it into a practice’s marketing materials: every time your team accurately files a confirmation statement, updates a PSC record, or ensures a client’s registered office is legitimate, you are doing something that extends well beyond that client relationship.

You are contributing to the integrity of a public register that is accessed — freely — over 16 billion times a year.

Companies House data is worth an estimated £1 billion to £3 billion per year to its users.

That value flows to businesses performing due diligence on potential partners, lenders assessing creditworthiness, journalists investigating corporate structures, and law enforcement agencies following the money. Every clean, accurate, properly maintained filing your practice submits makes that register more reliable. Every error it avoids prevents a ripple of misinformation flowing downstream.

That’s not a compliance function. That’s a public good.

The register was broken. Practitioners helped hold it together.

Before the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023 began its phased implementation from March 2024, Companies House generally accepted documents sent to it and placed them on the public register with limited verification. The consequences were significant.

Between 4 March 2024 and 3 March 2025 alone, Companies House queried and removed false or misleading information affecting over 100,400 companies and rejected more than 10,200 suspicious applications. False entries were cleared across tens of thousands of registered office, officer, and PSC addresses.

Think about those figures. Over 100,000 companies with compromised register entries — addresses used fraudulently, directors obscured, PSCs hidden behind untraceable details. The register that businesses and individuals relied upon to make decisions was, in thousands of cases, not telling the truth.

The practices doing company secretarial work properly — your practices — were already the counterweight to this. Your insistence on accurate officer addresses, your careful maintenance of PSC records, your timely and complete filings: all of it meant your clients’ entries on that register were trustworthy. You were quietly upholding standards that the system itself couldn’t enforce.

The stakes are rising. So is the recognition — finally.

The ECCTA represents the most significant overhaul of Companies House in a generation. Companies House has moved from being a passive collector of information to an active guardian of corporate transparency. Identity verification is now compulsory for new directors and PSCs, with a twelve-month transition period underway for the 7.4 million existing directors and PSCs who need to comply.

Implementation activity and transitional periods are expected to continue into 2027, with further changes on the horizon for company accounts, filing methods, and limited partnership transparency.

This is not the world in which company secretarial work was a quiet administrative bolt-on. With tighter oversight, more scrutiny, and increasing expectations from both regulators and clients, the risk-reward balance has shifted. The work your team has always taken seriously is now operating in a landscape that has finally caught up with them.

The invisible architecture of business health

There’s a broader argument here that’s worth making plainly.

Despite the critical role that company secretaries play, their importance is often overshadowed by the focus placed on directors’ duties and board effectiveness. The discourse around corporate governance — even in the SME space — tends to revolve around strategy, financial performance, and leadership. The structural compliance layer beneath it all gets taken for granted.

But healthy business administration isn’t a bureaucratic nicety. It’s the foundation on which everything else rests. Companies that maintain accurate statutory records, keep their governance in order, and file truthfully and on time are companies that are harder to defraud, easier to audit, and more straightforward to transact with. They are better partners, better employers, and better citizens of the economy.

The professionals who create and maintain that foundation — in accountancy practices, often working across dozens of client companies simultaneously — are doing something genuinely significant. They are, in the truest sense, making British business work better.

A moment to say it plainly

To every company secretarial professional working in an accountancy practice — the person who remembers the confirmation statement deadline when the client has forgotten, who spots the incorrect PSC entry before it causes a problem, who keeps the statutory books in order while everyone else focuses on the year-end accounts:

We see you. We understand what that work is worth.

And at a time when the regulatory landscape is demanding more of it than ever before, we think it’s important that your profession hears that clearly.

The work you do is not administrative background noise. It is the connective tissue of a functioning, transparent, trustworthy corporate economy. That matters more now than it ever has.

Inform Direct provides company secretarial software built for the professionals who take this work seriously. We’d rather help you do it better than tell you how important it is — but on this occasion, we thought both were worth saying.

This content may have been developed with the assistance of AI tools. Content is reviewed by a member of the Bright team before publication. Guidance on legislation can be obtained from your industry body.