The ECCTA deadline for accountants: audit your client book before November 2026

If your firm files confirmation statements for client companies, ECCTA identity verification is now your problem as much as your clients'. Since November 2025 Companies House rejects a CS01 when any director is unverified, and from 18 November 2026 acting as an unverified director becomes a criminal offence. Companies House estimates six to seven million individuals need to verify during the transition. Some of them are your clients' directors - and they will not tell you.

Why the deadline is really a rolling series of deadlines

Existing directors must verify before their company's next confirmation statement, not by a fixed calendar date. A client with a March statement date needed verified directors in March. Your exposure is spread across the entire year, one client filing at a time - which is why a one-off reminder email to all clients in January does not solve it.

A practical checklist for firms

1. Build the list. Every active client company, its confirmation statement date, and its current directors and PSCs.
2. Check verification status for each person. The register now exposes this per officer. Doing it manually takes 2-3 minutes per company; for a 300-client book that is a working week, and it goes stale as soon as a director changes.
3. Rank by filing date. Clients filing soonest with unverified directors are your urgent pile.
4. Chase with specifics. "John Smith and one PSC at Acme Ltd are unverified and your statement is due 14 August" gets action; a generic ECCTA circular does not.
5. Re-check continuously. Directors join, resign and verify all year. A snapshot from March says nothing about September.

Consider becoming (or using) an ACSP

Firms registered as Authorised Corporate Service Providers can verify client directors themselves - a genuine service opportunity. Whether or not you take that route, you still need to know who needs verifying in the first place, which is the monitoring problem above.

The shortcut

Steps 1, 2, 3 and 5 are exactly what Registrum automates. Our free portfolio scan takes your client list and returns the gap report: which companies have unverified directors or PSCs, who exactly, and which filings are at risk. Ongoing monitoring then re-checks every client on a 6-hour cycle and alerts you on any change. You can also spot-check any single company now with the free checker.