You can’t sue a dissolved company.
Once a director phoenixes, closes one company owing you, opens another, your invoice is legally worthless. The Insolvency Service catches just 7 of 6,274 phoenix directors over six years. We catch the pattern before you sign.
Every other client failure mode has recourse. This one doesn’t.
Payment timing evidence, where available, is shown as context only. RecoupIQ does not calculate interest, compensation or legal entitlement.
If a company enters administration, the relationship and evidence context can change. Review the official record and obtain qualified advice where needed.
But if a director phoenixes, dissolves the company that owes you on Friday, opens a new one with the same trade and address on Monday, you lose all of these options. There is no legal entity to sue. There is no estate to claim against. The director walks away with your invoice already written off.
The State catches phoenix directors 0.1% of the time.
The UK Insolvency Service publishes director disqualification data annually. Between 2018 and 2024, the agency disqualified 6,274 directors for misconduct. Of those, just seven were disqualified explicitly for phoenixism (Insolvency Service Annual Report 2024-25). The Spring Statement 2025 named “contrived insolvency and abusive phoenixism” as a priority for HMRC, the Insolvency Service, and Companies House, the regulators have publicly said the pattern is accelerating and they cannot keep up at scale.
Your next bad client may be one of the directors the State has named as showing phoenix indicators but cannot prosecute fast enough. The detection gap is the opportunity.
We trace every director across every company they’ve run.
Companies House publishes director appointment and termination data on every UK limited company. RecoupIQ ingests this continuously and builds a map of every director and the companies they’ve run. Each director’s career path becomes traceable across every entity they have ever held office in.
RecoupIQ’s models then read that map for the second-company restart pattern: a company dissolved and a near-identical one reopened, sharing the same trade, registered address, or co-directors. Each match is scored against a confidence threshold; only high-confidence matches surface as Phoenix Index flags on the prospect’s risk scorecard.
The whole pipeline runs in under 90 seconds per scan. The data is public, we’re not buying anything from a credit bureau, we’re reading what Companies House already publishes and surfacing the pattern at scale.
Score every prospect before you sign.
Phoenix detection is one signal of many. The free scan also surfaces going-concern flags (auditor warnings of material uncertainty), HMRC tax-defaulter matches, charges, dissolutions in progress, and accounts overdue. All in 90 seconds, all from public UK regulatory sources.
Phoenix detection is one of many.
Going-concern flag →
When the company’s own auditor adds a material-uncertainty note to its filed accounts, the financial equivalent of “the lights might be going out”, we surface it from their iXBRL filing.
HMRC tax-defaulter match →
The HMRC defaulters list is public. We match prospect company name + address + trade to the list at confidence ≥ 0.8. Includes 736 directors disqualified for Covid-loan abuse.