6,214 UK companies still flag on disqualified director name matches, leaving creditors with a manual check after ECCTA

What the data shows As of 5 August 2026, RecoupIQ’s weekly screen against the public Disqualified Directors register flagged 6,214 UK companies with an officer whose name matches one of 481 distinct entries on that register. These are name matches only, not verified identity matches. For lenders, accountants and SME owners, that is the practical surprise: even after Companies House identity verification became mandatory from 18 November 2025, the manual review problem has not gone away, as set out in the official Companies House update on identity verification. This matters because a name-only screen still produces a sizeable queue for review. A company can be caught because an officer shares a name with an entry on the register, not because the person has been confirmed as the same individual. That distinction is the whole point of the alert, and it is why any follow-up check has to be done carefully.

Why this is a name match, not a verified finding RecoupIQ joins normalised name strings across public records. That is useful for surfacing patterns quickly, but common names, initials and spelling variations can produce coincidental overlaps. A flagged company is therefore a prompt to verify, not a conclusion. Readers should verify identity via the Disqualified Directors register and Companies House before drawing conclusions. In plain terms, this is a shortlist for checking, not a statement that an officer is disqualified.

What creditors and procurement teams should do

Three checks worth making First, if a company is flagged on a name match, review the relevant entry on the Disqualified Directors register and compare it with the public identifiers shown on the company record before drawing conclusions. Second, check the company’s officer and PSC pages on Companies House for appointment history, service addresses and other published identifiers that help separate a genuine overlap from a same-name coincidence. Third, ask the company or its adviser to confirm whether the flagged individual is the same person. If your onboarding process also includes sanctions screening, run that as a separate step against the UK Sanctions List (FCDO). Again, a match there is still a name match until verified against the source register.

How RecoupIQ surfaces this We refresh this screen daily using a normalised name join against the named public register, then publish only aggregated counts that meet our rule-of-5 threshold. That means we do not publish outputs smaller than 5, which helps prevent re-identification while still showing where the wider pattern sits. You can read the scoring approach at RecoupIQ’s methodology page. If a company you are reviewing is flagged on a name match, our £167 Forensic Report shows the per-company anomaly score so you can decide what to check next.

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