Steve O’Neill on behalf of BTC is a Registered Agent for the registration process of overseas entities.
Action required prior to application for registration
Identification of registrable beneficial owners -Before making an application to register, an overseas entity must take reasonable steps to identify its registrable beneficial owner and obtain the required information. The steps that an overseas entity must take include giving an information notice to a person it knows, or has reasonable cause to believe, is a registrable beneficial owner.
What information must be verified?
Verification involves verifying information about overseas entities, beneficial owners and managing officers. Verification checks for individuals should involve looking at both evidence to match their identity as well as evidence of the condition met to be a beneficial owner (or managing officer).
Business Tax Centre’s work (BTC)
BTC has an Agent Assurance Code and is a relevant person for collating and verifying the required information and submitting a statement with evidence to Companies House to generate the Overseas Entities ID number. BTC is a member of the International Compliance Association (ICA) for Money Laundering Compliance issues. We will;
Overseas entity
Obtain evidence and verification of the overseas registry for the overseas entity by a International Company search linking registry data with local knowledge. It will where identify directors and beneficial owners for verification. This should match the information declared initially. The overseas entity will be checked for sanctions listing on the Dow Jones Watch Lists.
Beneficial Owners
We use electronic biometric checks, this is the standard requested by HM Land Registry for land ownership, this involves the beneficial owner using an app to scan their passport and take a 52-point liveliness ‘selfie’ to compare to the passport. The generated report is again run through all the Dow Jones worldwide watch lists for Politically Exposed Persons (PEP). Sanctions and other negative information such as criminality.
Submission
Once the verification process is complete, we will prepare the relevant statement and submit to Companies House and monitor the application.
Completion
On receiving the overseas entities ID Number we will forward that to you along with copies of the verification evidence which will aid in your own AML compliance procedures.