An unregulated label

How we work

Why the boundaries are on the front page

Business support is not a protected description, is not licensed, and requires no qualification. A buyer looking at two providers therefore has nothing objective to compare, which is an unusual position in commercial life and not a comfortable one. The most useful thing a provider in that position can do is publish where its own work stops, because the requests that arrive are not evenly distributed: a predictable handful of them fall just outside the unregulated space, and a provider who says yes to those is either unaware of the position or indifferent to it.

The first of them is the one almost nobody connects to themselves. The money laundering regulations define a trust or company service provider by what it does — forming companies for other people, providing a registered office or business address, acting or arranging for another to act as director, secretary or partner, acting or arranging for a nominee shareholder — and anyone carrying on those activities by way of business must be registered with HMRC for anti-money-laundering supervision. Carrying them on without registration is an offence. The reason this gets missed is almost linguistic: a provider reasons that it is a registered company and therefore registered. Those are different registers, and HMRC publishes who is on its one, which makes checking a provider genuinely quick.

The second boundary is sharper still because it is criminal rather than regulatory. Providing immigration advice or immigration services in the course of a business is an offence unless the person is a qualified person — regulated by the Immigration Advice Authority, formerly the Office of the Immigration Services Commissioner, or a solicitor, barrister or legal executive regulated by a designated professional body. It catches advice given free of charge, if given in the course of a business, and it catches filling in an application form for somebody, which a great many people would describe as help with paperwork. A narrower point is worth keeping straight alongside it: an employer checking its own employees' right to work is doing its own job, not advising anyone. The third boundary is money. Holding or moving a client's funds can amount to a payment service requiring permission from the Financial Conduct Authority, so payments stay with the client and the accounts stay in the client's name. None of these three happen here, and a request for one gets a refusal with a reason and a direction.