Monday 6th July

If you are like me you might actually like the sunny weather and want to be outside enjoying the great British summer. But as well as it getting hotter outside, the temperature within Project Companies Act certainly seems to be heating up.

We have been wrestling with a number of hot potatoes these past two weeks. For example:

IN01 – now it might sound like a new strain of swine flu but is in fact the code for the new incorporating document post-October 1st. The form seems to provide a significant amount of information around directors, subscribers and shareholders. However, keying this information is not as straightforward as it may seem. We are not clear which parts of the form are compulsory and which may or may not be rejected by Companies House if they are not completed. Moreover, it is not clear whether shelf companies will have first shareholders and then transfer or allot shares on a form that does not have name and address details - making the initial shareholder information redundant. So a bit of the old Sherlock Holmes detective work is needed before we fully commit to a program of keying data. I guess, like all things in British law, we have to wait and see and look for the precedents.

Next nettle to wrestle has been the expunging of data on old forms. Directors can request that old forms are updated and personal data is removed (but at a cost). What the take up of this will be like know one can really say. Certainly ICC will be taking advice to understand what we have to do (it is certainly clear Companies House have to remove data - but for third parties it is less clear). We can see a world where searching and reporting on corporate data works similar to the consumer world, i.e. a search purpose is required. But this is to try and stop bad people doing bad things with data. Surely most use is for legitimate reasons by good people in reputable organisations? Certainly we cannot see any reason why our users would need to locate and remove data.

We have also been working on delivering the bulk specifications (drafts of course – we cannot get a definitive spec yet you know) to our integration clients. If you take bulk data from ICC and have not seen the information in relation to your content please get in touch with Matt (mcornwell@icc.co.uk) and he will be happy to help out. We have also completed our transformation mapping work. This will make sure new responses from the updated xml gateway can pick up all the relevant existing and new data without having to change the actual xml calls from our clients.

So, the reality is that most ICC people are sitting in a modern air conditioned building and are certainly not out enjoying the great weather. I suspect we will all be continuing this over the next 3 months, although whether the sun hangs around all summer long remains to be seen (it is an Ashes summer so we have to expect some rain just to keep us in the game for 5 days).

Finally, a quick set of warm congratulations. Firstly to Marie at Companies House (the MBE is well deserved). Secondly to Cathy Fuller (our legal account manager) who got married at the weekend. I am sure despite being on her honeymoon our legal clients Companies Act questions are at the forefront of her mind. (;-).