The penalties shown below apply where accounts which are filed on or after 1st February 2009 have not been filed within the period allowed by the relevant companies act.
| Length of period |
Public company |
Private company |
| Not more than 1 month |
£750 |
£150 |
| More than 1 month but not more than 3 months |
£1500 |
£375 |
| More than 3 months but not more than 6 months |
£3000 |
£750 |
| More than 6 months |
£7500 |
£1500 |
Notes on table:
1. The first column of the table (“length of period”) refers to the length of the period between the end of the period for filing the accounts and reports in question and the day on which the requirements of the appropriate act are complied with.
2. Whether a company is a public company or a private company depends upon its status at the end of the financial year in question.
3. If there is a failure to comply with filing requirements in two successive years then the penalty in the second year is double that shown in the table. Note that there is no provision for doubling the penalty for late filing in two successive years when either year began before 6th April 2008.
4. The increased penalties above also apply where a company files its accounts (or an LLP delivers its accounts and auditors’ reports) on or after 1st February 2009 under Companies Act 1985 (that is for a financial year beginning before 6th April 2008). The provision for doubling the penalty for late filing in two successive years, however, does not apply to limited liability partnerships, because section 453 of the Companies Act 2006 does not yet apply to limited liability partnerships.
Filing Deadlines
Section 442 of the Companies Act 2006 has changed the filing deadline for accounts and reports for financial years beginning on or after 6 April 2008.
The period for filing accounts for a private company will become 9 months after the end of the relevant accounting reference period. For a public company, the period is 6 months.
Notice that the 9-month deadline for filing private company accounts and reports is applied by SI 2008/497 to the delivery of the accounts and auditors’ reports of limited liability partnerships for financial years beginning on or after 6th April 2008.
For private companies, the first year-ends to be affected by the new deadline are years ended 30 April 2009 (assuming that the company year is a period of 12 months and the year-end falls on the last day of the month). For the private company with a year-end of 30 April 2009, the filing deadline is 31 January 2010.
Readers might think that I have got the above date wrong because they will be applying the corresponding date rule. Under this rule, 9 months after 30 April is 30 January – not 31 January. Many companies have been fined over the years for filing a day late in ignorance of this rule.
In CA 2006, Section 443 sets out the new rule for calculating the period for filing accounts when this is expressed as a number of months after a specified date or the end of a specified period. Generally speaking if the specified period ends with a date such as 25 June, then 9 months later will be 25 March. However, if the specified date, or the last day of the specified period is the last day of a month then the period for filing accounts ends with the last day of the appropriate month (whether or not that is the corresponding date). That is, if the specified period ends with 30 June, then 9 months later will be 31 March. This reverses the “corresponding date rule”.
Alan Bonham
25 April 2008