Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what cooperation and sharing of information takes place between HMRC and Companies House on dormant companies.

Since 2010 Companies House has provided an electronic feed of the publicly available information about accounts submitted to them. This information is used by HMRC to help monitor companies telling HMRC that they are dormant.

Other than this, information sharing was extremely limited because there was no legal gateway allowing this. The Digital Economy Act 2017 allows for greater sharing of information for the purposes of fraud identification. HMRC is using data analytics to identify companies who appear to be incorrectly filing dormant accounts. Where such cases are identified the information is shared with Companies House and the two departments co-operate to consider whether enforcement action is appropriate.