Quarterly News

Websites and electronic documents - additional corporate disclosures.

At the very end of last year the government issued new legislation extending the requirements for companies to provide certain particulars about themselves to electronic documents and websites. As the legislation extends requirements in the Companies Act, it also applies to Limited Liability Partnerships (LLPs). Therefore all references to ‘companies’ below should be taken to apply equally to LLPs.

Company particulars

The Companies Act has for some time required companies to include certain details on corporate stationery and other hard copy documents. The main requirements are in respect of:

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

What has changed

The above requirements are now extended to also include the company’s website. The second change is that the reference to any 'document' is extended to include that document in electronic or any other form. 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.

The legislation became effective on 1 January 2007 and there are penalties for those who do not comply.

Action

If you have not already taken action in respect of the new requirements you should do so immediately. The legislation does not stipulate where the information should appear on your website but you could for example use the 'about us' or 'contact us' page.

As many of us now conduct business correspondence by email, emails are potentially business letters for statutory purposes. You could consider adding the required information to any 'disclaimer' that typically appears at the end of an email. Your email systems could be set up to include these automatically. Suitable extra wording could be along the lines of:

XYZ Limited. XYZ Limited is a company registered in England and Wales with company number -------. Registered Office: Ash House, Lower Road, London EC XXX.

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