Upcoming requirements for PSC’s

New laws relating to companies started to arrive in 2015 and will continue to arrive over the course of this year. Some will even have practical implications for your business at ground level, so all ears (or eyes) please…

One of the new upcoming requirements is in relation to people with significant control (PSC) over a business. From April 2016, companies or LLPs will be required to identify PSCs by keeping a publicly accessible register of such people containing various bits of information. Where control is exercised by a company (rather than a human being), one benefit is that the register will pave the way to get to a human being up along the corporate tree relatively easily (at least compared to the way it is now).

A PSC is someone who has more than 25% of a company or LLP’s shares or voting rights, or someone who exercises control of its management in some other way. Although this means additional compliance matters for your business, there may also be some benefits to transparency.

Until recently, similar disclosure rules applied only to the big cats in the UK market (i.e. publicly traded cats) but, since the market is made up of some 5.4 million other businesses (of which more than 99% are SMEs), it was about time such rules were rolled out to the rest of the business population.

Given the definition of PSC, the information on the register can be more insightful than what is currently available from Companies House. Not only will we have information relating to shareholders but also about those who effectively control the running of the company. All of this will, no doubt, be of use when it comes to identifying who you really need to be dealing with in certain corporate and commercial transactions, or even who you need to be going after in a dispute.

If you’d like help setting up your register or have any questions about the implications of the new laws for you and your business do get in touch.