A AIM Company Secretary writes...
As all will be aware, it became a legal requirement on 18 November 2025 that, in order to file annual confirmation statements for companies, all directors’ verification codes need to be added.
We have found that some codes, even though valid, are being rejected by Companies House and upon enquiry the reason given is that the identification used by the directors to verify themselves at Companies House needs to match precisely the details on their register, i.e. their full names and dates of birth.
Clearly it would have been helpful if this had been publicised back in the summer. We are now checking these directors’ details with them, particularly middle names by asking also for copies of their passport or driver’s licence. However, for one director the rejection has been made despite all of these details matching their passport which suggests the problem may in part lie also with Companies House itself.
Has anyone else encountered this issue and, if so, how are you responding?
Hello.
Are you filing the confirmation statement via Diligent? If so, we have had this issue, CH have rejected it stating that all Director’s names dont match what they have registered with. When accessing the Company via WebFiling, you can input each Director code individually and it tell you in real time if the code has been accepted or not. We found that it was just one Director who was causing the confirmation statement to be rejected (rather than all of them) and in order to get the confirmtion statement filed, we were able to override the error message by stating that this individual used a different name as it was his preferred name. It was accepted 20 minutes later. It turned out this one Director had used their driving licence to verify themselves which didnt include his middle name?! We are now looking in to possibly going through the verification process with this individual again so it matches in the future.
We have also had a few conversations with Companies House now and i do know that they are experiencing some tech issues so it could be that also. Its worth raising with them just to be sure.
We have 200+ UK entities in our structure with different Boards for each entitiy and we managed this internally without the help of an ACSP so i feel we have encountered all the issues we possibly could have at this point!
Hope you get it sorted 🙂
We didn’t encounter that particular problem but we did have a problem with one of the directors’ codes not being in the right format when issued, therefore being rejected when needed. Generally, any problems with IDV we resolve either via our ACSP or via the Companies House enquiries helpline (enquiries@companieshouse.gov.uk). The ACSP route may not be appropriate for many companies but we have found it to be one of the best decisions we ever made! They removed much of the pain from the process and liaise with Companies House directly.
This happened to us when filing a confirmation statement. We phoned Companies House and we were told there was a glitch in their software and to file a paper copy. We resubmitted the electronic version and our later attempt was accepted.