What happened
A company audit form asked for a company number and the submission supplied one. It looks exactly like a company number because it is one.
On the register it belongs to a building company in Southport, dissolved in 2019. The business that submitted the form is not on the UK register at all, being incorporated elsewhere.
Had that gone into a report as theirs, it would have been a false statement about a real company, in writing, under our name. The form takes the number on trust, which is a gap worth naming.
Why it matters more than it sounds
A company number is the one value no other company shares. That makes it the strongest possible join between your website and the official record, and the single most useful thing you can state about yourself.
Which also means a wrong one joins you to somebody else, confidently and permanently, in exactly the place a careful reader will check.
Everything that makes a company number worth stating is also what makes a wrong one expensive.
Three ways it goes wrong
All three measured on real subjects:
- A number transcribed with a digit out, which lands on a real, unrelated company rather than on nothing.
- The number of a predecessor company that was dissolved, carried forward onto the new one's website.
- No number at all, which is the most common of the three and is also a disclosure requirement most small firms quietly ignore.
The second is the one that overlaps a dead company on page one, and the two together are how a firm ends up entirely represented by a company that no longer exists.
Check it in two minutes
Open the public register, search your own company name, and read what comes back. Check the number, the status, the registered office and the list of officers.
Then check your own website states that number, correctly, somewhere a reader can find it. Then check it matches on every directory and profile you have.
A name on its own is not enough to go on. On one audit, six people with the same full name sat on the officer register, and it took four separate signals agreeing before we would say which was the client.
An audit submission in September 2026 supplied a company number which, on the register, belongs to a building company in Southport dissolved in 2019. The subject's actual company is not on the UK register at all.