If a report has been run about you

Check the Director lets businesses see a person's history as a company officer, as the public Companies House register records it. A business might run a report before investing in a company, lending to it, taking on a director, or in insolvency or legal work.

What a report contains

Information from Companies House: the names on your officer records, your month and year of birth, your appointments, entries about you on the registers of shareholders and people with significant control, any entry on the disqualified directors register, and what your companies have filed.

From The Gazette, notices that a company you have been an officer of was the subject of a petition to wind it up, or that such a petition was dismissed. And, searched under your name: The Gazette's personal insolvency notices, such as a bankruptcy order; the UK Sanctions List; the US Treasury's list of Specially Designated Nationals and the EU's consolidated list of financial sanctions; the Individual Insolvency Register; HMRC's list of deliberate tax defaulters; the Charity Commission for England and Wales' register of charities and their trustees, and its register of removed trustees; the FCA's Financial Services Register; France's register of companies and Norway's register of roles, for a director of your name born in your month and year. An entry is linked to you only on the evidence the privacy notice describes for each source, and a report says when an entry under your name may be someone else's.

Every statement cites its source. Nothing in a report is a judgement of you. A report on another person may also name you, as the register does, where you held office at two or more of their companies, with your role and dates there and what became of each company. A report on a company names its officers and people with significant control as the register does. Any report can also name you where a company's filings list you as a shareholder, as a subscriber when it was formed, or as a creditor; and we hold with it the names of those entitled under a company's registered charges, though the report shows only how many there are.

A business that has run a report may also watch your record for up to twelve months: we re-read the same register entries each month, or each week, and tell them what has changed, in the same terms. The privacy notice describes this under “Watching”.

Why we are allowed to do this

We rely on legitimate interests: ours in providing the service, and our customers' in making business decisions from the public record. Customers must have a legitimate business interest in the person before they run a report. The privacy notice explains this in full.

What you can ask for

• whether reports have been run about you, or a watch set on your record, and when, and the kind of organisation that did so;
• a copy of what those reports say about you;
• correction of anything we got wrong in compiling a report;
• that we stop using your data, or delete it; or you can object to our using it.

If the Companies House register itself is wrong, only Companies House can correct it; we will reflect the correction in any later report.

How to ask

Email privacy@checkthedirector.co.uk with:

• your name;
• the web address of each of your officer records on the Companies House service, for example https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/officers/…/appointments, so that we can find the right reports;
• if you have never held office, and so have no officer record, your month and year of birth instead;
• what you are asking for.

We may ask you to prove who you are. We will answer within one month. If you are unhappy with our answer, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office at ico.org.uk.