Corporate officer vs Human officer

#1

We are currently relying on the officer_role field to determine if an officer is a company or a person. In short if we find the word corporate in the value for officer_role we assume it’s a company, otherwise an individual.

We found however an exception when listing officers for company 04591440:

{
      "resigned_on": "2002-11-29",
      "links": {
        "officer": {
          "appointments": "/officers/IIyHVPELsK34KMmOQrYXB3CSoa0/appointments"
        }
      },
      "name": "LEE & PRIESTLEY LIMITED",
      "officer_role": "director",
      "appointed_on": "2002-11-15",
      "address": {
        "locality": "Leeds",
        "address_line_1": "No 10-12 East Parade",
        "postal_code": "LS1 2AJ",
        "region": "West Yorkshire"
      }
    }

As you can see, this is clearly a company given its name (LEE & PRIESTLEY LIMITED), however the officer_role is simply "director" which confuses our “algorithm” for officer type detection.

I was wondering if this is a data error or if CH can suggest a more reliable way to determine if an officer is a company or an individual?

#2

I think these are data errors by CH:

We thought there might be a way round this by looking up the officer appointments link but when this has happened before (and in this case) you get (here using /officers/IIyHVPELsK34KMmOQrYXB3CSoa0/appointments)
:

{
  "is_corporate_officer" : false,
  "items" : [ ...
}

…so that doesn’t help.

1 Like
#3

Thanks both, I will get this investigated.

#4

I can confirm that this is a data error.
It will be fixed shortly.
I will get back to you when we have completed our investigation.

#5

This has now been corrected.
For your interest, there were 51 appointments, that required 27 corrections.
Thanks for taking the time to report this.
If you find anymore, please let us know.

1 Like
#6

Is this another example? A company with a birth date?

We’ve found about 1158 of these in the past, although some of them may have been fixed.

#7

This is also being investigated…Thank you for the report.

#8

I have the following information that explains the issue:-

Before the introduction of the 2006 Companies Act all officers (corporate or natural) were required to use the same forms to register their appointment at Companies House. These forms did not have a mechanism for the presenter of the information to explicitly state when an officer was a corporate entity, and whilst this may seem obvious from the officer name it can never be 100% guaranteed. Therefore Companies House can only categorically state an officer is a corporate entity where a) it has been verified (pre 2006 Companies Act appointments), or b) the appointment is post 2006 Companies Act and has been supplied on a specific corporate officer form, or section of a form.