User-Centric Bureaucracy – Hats Off to Companies House

With my Company Secretary hat on, I’ve just returned from a Companies House seminar to raise awareness on the final batch of changes which will be enacted by the Companies Act 2006 when it comes into effect on 1st October 2009.  A pretty dry subject, but I take my (Company Secretary’s) hat off to Companies House – the delivery was first class.

Companies House is an organisation with its own bureaucratic challenges.  Its UK HQ in Cardiff contains 30 miles of shelving for paper-based records; it incorporates 4,000 new companies per week; and it takes them 24 hours to open the mail each day, such are the volumes they receive.

All of my recent dealings with Companies House have been nothing less than efficient, professional and helpful.  Despite the operational challenges they clearly face, there is a clear determination in all that they do to focus their activities around the needs of the end user.  I offer a few examples:

WebFiling

The WebFiling service is a revelation.  All companies have a statutory obligation to file certain documents such as Annual Accounts and Annual Returns with Companies House. 

Once upon a time this was a slow and painful process.  The Annual Return form is 28 pages long; it could take well over an hour to complete; even once you’d sent it in it could take up to 10 days for Companies House to accept the form.  Even then there was a risk of rejection because of a minor error (last year 130,000 returns were rejected because the sender had forgotten to sign the form). 

With the WebFiling Service, it took me less than half an hour to complete two Annual Returns.  The forms were pre-populated, validated for errors prior to submission and I had acceptance confirmed within 20 minutes.

New Forms

Until now, Companies House forms had pretty inpenetrable names and reference numbers.  A 288a form for this, a 288b form for that a 363a form for the next thing.  Anyone who has ever dealt with HMRC will know what I mean. 

Well, Companies House is changing all that to make things more intelligible for its customers.  It’s introducing a series of new prefixes for its forms.  So, now if you’re looking to notify Companies House of a new Appointment, you look for an AP form; if you’re looking to notify a Termination, you look for a TM form.

It’s not rocket science.  Its a simple yet highly effective change which will help the thousands of users who have to interact with Companies House.

Companies Act Publicity & Planning

Companies House is pulling all the stops out to keep companies informed about the changes which the Companies Act will bring.  There are a series of nationwide seminars, copious amounts of information leaflets, mailshots planned to the registered address of every company in Britain, a new web site with an RSS feed.

To meet the anticipated demand for the changes which the final implementation of the Act will effect, a huge training program has been laid on for staff, and all staff leave has been cancelled for the 2 weeks around 1st October.

Helpdesk

This is serviced by 60 fully trained staff, and I can testify to the efficiency of it.

Last week I called with a query in relation to the filing of Company Net’s Annual Return.  The phone was answered within 2 rings.  There was no automated triage system. The lady who picked up provided me with a clear answer to my question without having to pass me from pillar to post, and 2 minutes after picking up the phone I was done. 

And no premium rate phone numbers in operation here - the call was charged at local rates.

It’s easy to be critical when things don’t go right, so credit where its due when things do work out.  When it comes to servicing the needs of its users I can think of numerous bureaucratic organisations – in both the public and private sectors - who could take a leaf from the Companies House book.

Global Data Protection White Paper

Most individual countries worldwide now have their own legal framework with respect to Data Protection and Direct Marketing. However, standards vary widely from country to country. In recent decades, a number of collective mandates have been initiated which attempt to standardise the treatment of data flows between countries, some more successfully than others. These are commonly referred to as there is ambiguity over how legally enforceable such initiatives are:

“The common feature of all these initiatives is that they are non-binding international instruments, or in international law parlance, soft law.”

(The EU Data Protection Directive: An Engine of a Global Regime, Michael D. Birnhack, 2008).

Company Net has drafted a Global Data Protection White Paper, the purpose of which is to set out the historical background to the emergence of these initiatives, and to summarise the current position which seems to favour the EU Data Protection Directive (and its associated directives, the EU Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications, and the EU Data Retention Directive) as the most dominant, and most stringent initiative worldwide. That said, there are still significant complexities and anomalies of the treatment of data even within EU member countries, even within the EU. This document assesses some of these complexities. You can view it at: Global Data Protection White Paper.