Additional corporate disclosures

If you are a company director or a member of a Limited Liability Partnership (LLP) you are no doubt aware that company law requires you to include certain particulars about your business on corporate stationery and other hard copy documents. As a reminder, two of the main statutory requirements are in respect of:

Company name
This must appear on all business letters and other business documents including cheques, bills of exchange, orders for goods, invoices, receipts and notices and other official publications.
Other information
All business letters and order forms must include:
the company’s place of registration (England and Wales, Scotland etc) and registered number
the address of the registered office.

New requirements

At the start of the year the government issued new regulations, effective from 1 January 2007, that extend these statutory disclosure requirements. Although the changes are simple in nature they are likely to require action by many companies and LLPs.

The changes outlined below apply equally to LLPs as they do to companies.

The main change is that the requirement to include company particulars has been extended to include websites and electronic documents. This means that it is now an offence not to include:

the company’s name
its place of registration and registered number
the address of its registered office

on all the company’s websites and all its business letters and order forms that are in electronic form.

Practical considerations

Many companies now conduct correspondence by email. Email messages are therefore potentially business letters in electronic form for statutory purposes. A practical method of ensuring that your company is compliant with the new law is to include the required details in the ‘disclaimer footer’ that often appears at the end of an email. Your email system could be set up to automatically include standard text on all emails sent.

Suitable additional words could be as shown below.