The method, in the open.

Companies House keeps a separate record for each name and correspondence address a person has filed under, so one career is often split across several. We search the register for the name you give us, and use a company number, town or Companies House link to narrow it when you have one. If they used another name on some appointments, a nickname or a different spelling, give us the links to those too and we include them for you to confirm.

Or start from a company. Find it on the register and we list its directors and other officers, current and former, with their roles, their dates and any significant control they hold. Choose the people you need, or all the current directors at once. Each person is one report, and you confirm each person’s appointments in the same way. Once the reports are ready, the company’s board overview puts everyone you have checked there on one page against the criteria, each mark opening the report it came from.

Then we group the appointments we think belong to the same person, using the name (allowing for case, punctuation and middle names), the month and year of birth, shared correspondence addresses, and appointments at the same companies. Each record gets a confidence and the reasons for it:

High

Same name and month and year of birth, plus a shared address or an appointment at the same company.

Medium

Same name and month and year of birth, or same name and a shared address.

Low

The name alone. Shown to you, but left out unless you include it.

Records with a different month or year of birth are never combined. You confirm which to include before anything runs, and your choices are printed in the report’s methodology.

A person can also control a company without being one of its officers. Companies House’s register of people with significant control can’t be searched by name, so we load its daily published copy and search that for the same name and month and year of birth at companies not among the appointments above. Each entry found is read from the register itself and shown to you with a confidence: high where a correspondence address matches, medium where only the name and birth date do. High-confidence entries are included unless you exclude them; medium ones only if you include them.

For every company on the confirmed appointments we take the register’s own data — the appointments, the company’s status and dates, people with significant control, charges and insolvency cases — check the disqualified directors register, and look in The Gazette for notices of a petition to wind the company up and of a petition’s dismissal.

Then we read the documents themselves, up to forty per company. For accounts, that means the figures and the notes: related parties, loans to directors, going concern, events after the year end, and the auditor’s report where it isn’t clean.

We also read the latest confirmation statements, and for older companies the annual returns that listed shareholders before them; share allotments and what they raised; changes to the share structure; the shareholders when the company was formed; the date each strike-off application was signed; members’ resolutions; auditors’ statements on resigning; statements of affairs; and what liquidators and administrators report paying each class of creditor. Other filings, such as changes of officer or address, are listed by type and date.

• Digital accountsFigures read as structured data from the tagged accounts companies file, and the notes read in full.
• Typed PDFsRead from the document’s own text layer.
• Scanned paperRead by optical character recognition, page by page, with a confidence for each page. Pages it reads poorly are read again by an AI vision model.
• Every figure checkedEach figure read from a PDF keeps the page and the words it came from. If those words can’t be found on the cited page, the figure is marked unverified — shown, but never counted towards a criterion. On scanned pages a misread letter is allowed for; a misread figure never is.

From the register’s own dates we also work out each company’s filing record: whether its accounts and confirmation statements were filed by their due dates, and how many of its officers have come and gone over the years. Both are computed from the register, and the report says so where it shows them.

Finally we search ten sources outside Companies House under every name the person has used there: the UK Sanctions List, published by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office; the US Treasury's list of Specially Designated Nationals and the EU's consolidated list of financial sanctions, where a listing is shown as information, since those regimes bind US persons and business within the EU rather than a UK business as such, and the EU's list carries its own date because it can lag the Official Journal by weeks; the Individual Insolvency Register, kept by the Insolvency Service; The Gazette's personal insolvency notices, which we keep a copy of back to 1998 because the register drops a case three months after it ends; HMRC's published list of deliberate tax defaulters, matched on an address from the person's own records or a company's registered office because the list carries no birth dates; the Charity Commission's registers of trustees and of removed trustees, where a trusteeship counts as the person's only once you have confirmed it, because the register names trustees without a date of birth; and the FCA's Financial Services Register of approved and prohibited individuals, where a listing counts as the person's only when the register itself ties it to one of their companies by company number; France's register of companies, read through the French government's API, and Norway's register of roles, from our copy of its daily file, where a director is shown only when their name contains the person's and they were born in the same month and year, and namesakes born in another month are counted, never listed. Other countries' registers cannot lawfully be searched by a person's name, give no date of birth, or do not allow reuse, and the report lists each. Every entry found is shown with how its date of birth, address or company compares to the person's, and a Gazette case as the chain of its notices, from the order to the discharge. A shared name on its own is never counted as a criterion met. Scotland's Register of Insolvencies is not searched, and the report says so: Scottish sequestrations and trust deeds reach it only through The Gazette.

Each criterion met comes with one or more questions for you to ask, built from the facts behind it and worded neutrally. The report’s summary paragraph is drafted by an AI model from the extracted facts alone, and every sentence cites its sources.

Before a report is released, its wording is checked twice for any judgement of a person’s honesty, competence or character — against a list of banned terms, then by a second model. If either check fails, the report is held for a person to review instead of being delivered.

A report is a reading of the register on one day, so every report includes twelve months of watching at no further cost. Switch it on from the person’s page and we read their register entry again each month, or each week if you prefer, and email you when something has changed — a new appointment, a resignation, a company entering insolvency, a criterion newly met. The email says that something changed and where to look; it never carries the person’s name or the change itself. Watching can be stopped at any time.

Sometimes the question is about the company, not a person. From a company’s page you can run a report on the company by its number. It names the officers and people with significant control as the register does, checks each officer against the disqualified directors register, and reads the company’s own filings: its accounts, confirmation statements, charges, insolvency papers and Gazette notices, with its filing record. Where the company has a Legal Entity Identifier, the report shows it from GLEIF's published file, found by the company number, with the parents that consolidate its accounts as the company reported them to GLEIF, which is an accounting relationship and not the register of people with significant control; the same for each UK company that controls it. Most UK private companies have no identifier, and the report says so as a fact, not a concern.

A company report is measured against the criteria that apply to a company, never against those about a person’s career across companies. The UK, US and EU sanctions lists, by the company’s name and its company number, and HMRC’s list of deliberate tax defaulters are searched for the company itself. The Individual Insolvency Register, The Gazette’s personal insolvency notices, the Charity Commission’s registers and the FCA’s register of individuals are about people, so they are not searched for a company. It costs the same as a report on a person.

• The Companies House register does not cover sole traders, partnerships other than limited liability partnerships, overseas companies not registered in the UK, court records or credit data.
• Companies House does not verify the information filed with it.
• A report describes what the public registers show about a person’s companies, or about a company. It doesn’t check identity documents, and it isn’t a credit check.

Reports are private to the organisation that runs them. People can ask whether they have been reported on — here is how.