officer_role values - meaning of "corporate"

[voracityemail]

What is the meaning of “corporate” in respect of officers in the Officer Resource? We’d like to distinguish humans from companies / legal persons. Three points:

1. In the data we see some companies classified as “secretary” / “director” etc. as opposed to the expected “corporate-secretary” / “corporate-director”.
   Is this just an issue of companies not being flagged as such in the data? (We had wondered if “corporate-” was removed if the company wasn’t available via CH API but there’s a counterexample in “CORPORATE NOMINEES LIMITED” - 05036696 which is listed as “officer_role”: “director” but available in CH API.)
2. If we then check the appointments list for the given officer in these cases the field “is_corporate_officer” is set to false - is this correct? It is at least consistent with the value in the officer resource.
3. We also often see this for “nominee-secretary” / “nominee-director” etc. Could you clarify if this is correct? Does the “corporate” indication apply to the underlying person / entity or the nominee appearing in the data? Is it that if a nominee is standing for a company they’re e.g. “corporate-nominee-secretary”, if for a person then “nominee-secretary”?

There have been previous posts around this (e.g. this one although this was answered with reference to the spec).

Examples:

Looking at /company/06909966/officers

{
    "name": "ANGLIAN BUSINESS CONSULTANCY SERVICES",
    "officer_role": "secretary",
    "links": {
        "officer": {
            "appointments": "/officers/Hpn0KrPOAOP4OKqshrfqqtUfJ68/appointments"
        }
    },
    ...
}

Looking at /company/06903160/officers

{
    "name": "ANGLIAN BUSINESS CONSULTANCY SERVICES",
    "officer_role": "secretary",
    "links": {
        "officer": {
            "appointments": "/officers/pKu3WfC8D4At24esTw74lsnC9xs/appointments"
        }
    },
    ...
}

Looking at /company/03196419/officers, in the same officer resource list we have both possibilities!:

{
    "name": "M & K NOMINEE SECRETARIES LIMITED",
    "officer_role": "corporate-nominee-secretary",
    "appointed_on": "1996-05-09",
    "appointments": "/officers/2xpFexsrdOarQZd9uPeu8f4bhb0/appointments",
    ...
},
{
    "name": "CORPORATE NOMINEES LIMITED",
    "officer_role": "director",
    "appointed_on": "1998-01-01",
    "appointments": "/officers/WNcQC15lUMvA0w8R1yhOjw346Gc/appointments",
    ...
}

On the point about corporate-nominee vs. nominee, example from /company/03184321/officers: “BONDLAW SECRETARIES LIMITED” has an “officer_role”: “nominee-secretary” - is this correct or should it be “corporate-nominee-secretary”?

[mfairhurst]

@voracityemail

In summary this appears to be a data issue. We should be flagging corporate directors and secretaries correctly, including nominees, but as demonstrated in the examples provided this is not always the case.

I will flag this as a data issue to be investigated.

Thanks,

@mfairhurst

[voracityemail]

There are several reasons for trying to get some clarity here. Not least are issues like that shown by
A B & C SECRETARIAL LIMITED personal appointments - Find and update company information - GOV.UK - this definitely represents a company (“A B & C SECRETARIAL LIMITED”) but data returned is:

"kind": "personal-appointment",
"is_corporate_officer": false

… and there’s also a date of birth!

Clarity would help here because of other difficulties e.g. in this instance “A B & C SECRETARIAL LIMITED” is now 04673311, but it and “A G SECRETARIAL LIMITED” 02598128 have swapped names. The date of birth correcly corresponds to the date of incorporation of 02598128 “A G SECRETARIAL LIMITED” and indeed all the appointments were made before the name change, when the former was the latter, and vice versa…

As per e.g.:

Officer List return company number for corporates?

Hello, I’ve been asked it it’s possible to get the company number for a corporate officer. So, given a company number, I would get the officer list, and corporate officers would have their company number available (ideally). OfficerList resource has a “registration number” field in the identification section, however this is not populated for corporates. Eg 06872285 has a corporate secretary and corporate director, in the response I don’t see “registration number” populated. Is this just no…

… it would be very helpful to e.g. include a company number in officers list / officer appointment list to work out which company you’re looking at and get their full details, in the same way as you may be able to (if the data is supplied) with PSCs:

PSC kinds - examples and corporate PSC numbers

It seems (though not yet in specification documents) that the Persons with Significant Control list resource returns a “kind” field which indicates what type of entity the entry represents. This is very useful for us and this post is a note for others as isn’t yet fully documented. Also the relevant constants don’t yet appear in the constants files. The values of “kind” would logically seem to be as indicated in the individual resources for each type of entity: Individual (person) Corporat…

[voracityemail]

Other examples:

RM NOMINEES LIMITED - /officers/5Jcd7dBiPH80XOq7xhJpBd28XLU/appointments

I believe this represents a company (02892207 RM NOMINEES LIMITED) but in the list “is_corporate_officer”: is false. I can see “officer_role”: “corporate-nominee-director” and “officer_role”: “nominee-director”.