A letter I wrote to Companies House in March 2013

Date: Sat, 23 Mar 2013
To: enquiries@companies-house.gov.uk
Subject: Bureaucracy

Dear Companies House representative(s),

On February 13th, I went to the Companies House contact centre in London in person and requested the relevant forms for submitting the annual returns of ... Ltd. (Company Number: ...), a dormant company.

I was given a form AR01, which I completed and asked the staff at the Companies House office to check for me. I then paid the £40 fee with my debit card and left.  I later received an anonymous letter dated 18 February, informing me that I had not used the correct version of the form AR01 and that I should obtain the correct form, either from your website or from law stationers.

On March 14th, I received another letter, signed by ..., Compliance Case Officer (ref. ...), accompanied by the correct forms, asking me to complete and return them, along with a further fee of £40 and pointing out my legal responsibilities (but making no allowances for or reference to the responsibilities of Companies House staff in providing the correct forms).

I hereby wish to take this opportunity to express my concerns over the way in which this matter is being handled by Companies House:

a)  I went to the Companies House contact centre in London in person to make sure that I was complying with the regulations. You are now telling me that I should not have trusted your own staff and that I should have referred to your website as a more reliable authority. Unfortunately, it is equally possible that I could have downloaded the forms from the website only to have been told that the website was out of date and that I should have asked an authority at Companies House directly.  Should we be penalised in terms of my time, money and resources for going directly to the most legitimate authority, that is your own offices and officers, to obtain the correct forms?

b)  You sent me a letter telling me to obtain the correct form from either law stationers or your website, thus placing the onus on me to delve into all the old and new forms that may be around and asking and checking to make sure that I have the right forms.

c)  Later, you sent me a letter enclosing the correct forms and asked me to send it back to you along with a £40 fee which I had already paid.  If you were able to sent me the correct form in the first place, why did you ask me to go and look for it on the internet or in law stationers?

d)  And why ask me to pay again for something that I have already paid for expecting, in good faith, to have been given the correct forms by the offices at Companies House itself [I know, it is a ‘standard letter’ printed off and sent without any thought as to the extent of its relevance or impact – see paragraph regarding the zombification of society, below].

e)  I compared the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ forms and found that there is no functional difference between the two. In other words, there is no extra value in the information that you would receive on the new form as compared with the old form.  In other words, the whole exercise has been a total waste of time and resources.

f)  To make it clear to you how your approach to this matter has affected me, let me explain:

i)  I am no longer able to trust your staff at the contact centre.  If I am not able to trust someone I meet in person, how can I be expected to trust a website?  This lack of trust makes me more wary and hesitant in my approach to Companies house.

ii)  I have had to carry the burden of incomplete returns, wondering what to do next after your first letter (when to find the time to go back into Central London, or otherwise get some clear guidance).  It may be perfectly clear to you, but this would be the same as me expecting you to know how to apply for a research grant for looking into how to improve children's learning of mathematics (a very straight forward procedure as far as I am concerned).

iii)  I have had to seek advice from accountants and friends and to check on your website, download forms and try to decipher whether, for example the red warning related to ‘PROOF’ on downloadable the AR01 form has any bearing on what I am supposed to do or not (i.e . will be rejected again).

iv)  I spent time comparing the old and new forms looking for what might be that ‘vital’ piece of information that is so important to your system that you go through the process of rejecting and requesting that the form to be filled again. As it transpired; there was none.

g)  Now, let me explain the broader perspective of how your approach to this matter impacts the society we live in.  The time that I, as a citizen, spend on dealing with such petty bureaucracy deprives society of time that I can spend to contribute to society (that is you, me and everyone else), such as:

i)  Improving my business and the benefits that this would bring to society

ii)  Attending to my family’s needs and its positive benefits for our society

iii)  Time I could be spending with my children, helping them to become better citizens

iv)  Time I could be spending supporting friends with their social, psychological and spiritual needs

v)  Etc.

The consequences of these are that our children will end up living in a less enriched society.

Finally, given the above, as an educator, I am very concerned about the way in which our capacity to reason is being eroded as we rely increasingly on rigid rules imposed by mindless machines, putting us at the mercy of software and its developers.  Other examples of such trends within the system include a demand I received by the Inland Revenue for the sum of £0.00 which if not paid immediately would result in legal action being taken against me. I have also received letters from the Inland Revenue telling me that I have overpaid taxes and will be refunded, only to be followed by a demand letter from a debt collection agency for non-payment of the same tax.

Following this zombification of our society to its logical conclusion, what do you think our world will be like in a couple of decades from now? Would you like our children to live in a world like that? If not, please make sure that you play your part in bringing back humanity and reason into the system in ways that I am sure you are still capable of reasoning out for yourselves, but here is an example: Tell your bosses that for every penny spent in recruiting staff to provide a more personal service to companies, many pounds could be raised from increased tax revenues arising from a better-performing economy.

Having said my piece, what do you want me to do? Pay again? Fill in the almost identical new forms and send them back? Or can you just accept that I have provided you will all the information you are looking for plus the payment already and just file it?

In the hope that this letter will be read and treated as a plea of a concerned citizen calling fellow concerned citizens into action for us to treat each other less mechanically and more discerningly and empathetically... Over to you.

With my very best wishes (for all our futures),

Dr. Bijan Riazi-Farzad.

Director

Here is a visual summary of one of the main points of this letter 

I received a very polite and apologetic response which, in summary said that I had to fill in a new, near-identical, form anyway (but I could send it electronically and didn't need to pay again):

Dear Dr. Bijan Riazi-Farzad.

Thank you for your detailed e-mail, I have been asked to reply in my capacity as a Customer Services Officer.

Please accept my apologies for our error in providing you with the incorrect version of the AR01 form. It is disappointing to receive complaints concerning any of our staff or services.  Companies House has high standards that we expect our staff to meet, which helps us to ensure that customers receive the standard of service that they deserve.  Unfortunately however, we cannot remove the risk of the occasional human error.  That seems to be what happened in this instance. Your complaint will be brought to the attention of the staff concerned, who will be reminded of the need to ensure accuracy at all times.

I  am also sorry that the rejection letter was far from helpful due to the use of standard paragraphs and as you say the difference between the 2 AR01 forms are small ( 2007 Standard Industrial Classification code).

If you would like us to check the document before you post it please scan a pdf copy to me and I will have it examined .  This will ensure that it does not get rejected again, alternately, please be kind enough to return the document to:

         ...
         Customer Services
         Companies House
         FREEPOST 4008
         Crown Way
         Cardiff  CF14 1ZZ

We look forward to receiving the form AR01 so that the matter can be resolved as soon as possible.

In the meantime I would like to apologise on behalf of Companies House for the inconvenience and delays you have encountered on this occasion. As a mother of 3 myself I understand you have better things to do.  If you need to contact me direct at any point, my telephone number is ....

Yours sincerely


...
Customer Services