Companies House Webfilings

[Darren at Fox-Bartfield]

Co House

Is it normal practice for accountants to assume they have full authority to make webfilings without the Director’s approval or consent?

Not normally, no. Filing of accounts and confirmation statements should ethically and legally require the clients approval.

As @Maslins mentions, better to do the decent thing and obtain your approval and as long as best efforts to contact have been made, moving the registered office would suspect be ok, although normally this would be shifted to the new accountants rather than home address as tends to be a reason why the home address hasn't been used in the first place.

In reality, would you want any statutory mail being sent to your old accountants?

[Maslins]

Registered address changed to Home Address without client consent on termination. Accountant claiming they have full authority to do as they wish, nothing explicitly stated in contract.

My opinion:
- if they just did this, without contacting you first, not very professional.
- if they contacted you a couple of times asking what you wanted doing with the registered office address and you ignored them, perfectly fine IMHO.
- I personally couldn't give a monkeys what's in a contract and hate the way society drifts ever more towards dealing with people based on small print in contracts rather than just doing the decent thing given the circumstances.

[Jessica@WhiteFieldTax]

Yes, would have been nice if that was in the terms of business.

[rocketjet]

@OP - can you enlighten us as to what’s happened.

Registered address changed to Home Address without client consent on termination. Accountant claiming they have full authority to do as they wish, nothing explicitly stated in contract.

[Jessica@WhiteFieldTax]

Normally, no.

Possibly in the circumstances Alan suggests, and we also write into our terms that we can change Registerd Office for leavers.

@OP - can you enlighten us as to what’s happened.

[mudskipper]

Is it normal practice for accountants to assume they have full authority to make webfilings without the Director’s approval or consent?

AIUI you need to give the accountant a code to enable them to file on your behalf - thereby giving them approval/consent, although one would generally expect them to check with you first.

[Alan @ BroomeAffinity]

We would require authority from the client before filing accounts, but, we have on very rare occasions filed if we’re right against the deadline, the clients can’t be contacted, and the accounts are not in the least contentious. It would under no circumstances be considered standard practice.

[rocketjet]

Is it normal practice for accountants to assume they have full authority to make webfilings without the Director’s approval or consent?