Companies House ID verification failed? 8 reasons why it happened and how to fix the problem (2026)

In short: If your Companies House ID verification has failed, it’s almost always due to one of eight things:

• the GOV.UK One Login rejected your non-UK ID document
• mismatched personal details
• an unsupported or expired document
• poor photo quality on your ID document
• you're using an older phone and/or a phone without an NFC chip reader
• a shared email address
• a previous failed attempt on GOV.UK One Login
• a fault on the government's side

Some of these issues are fixable. But there is one thing you need to know immediately: once GOV.UK One Login has rejected you, that route — including the Post Office option — is closed to you. At that point an Authorised Corporate Service Provider (ACSP) such as directorverifications.com is your only remaining route.

directorVerifications.com will verify your identity in 24–48 hours for £24.99. We also offer a Fast Track, same-day service for £39.99, seven days per week - just upload your details to us by 5pm. You do not have to install or use an app, and no GOV.UK One Login account is needed.

Since identity verification became mandatory on 18 November 2025, thousands of UK company directors and PSCs have hit the same wall. You set aside twenty minutes, work through the GOV.UK One Login process, and get rejected — with no explanation you can act on.

This guide covers what has actually happened, what your options genuinely are, and the eight reasons why things go wrong and why so many people get rejected when using the GOV.UK One Login to verify their IDs. It also covers the two traps that catch out non-British directors in particular, which no other guide properly explains.

What actually happens when your verification fails

This is the screen you’ll see after you’ve been rejected by the GOV.UK One Login route:

Read the second paragraph carefully, because it’s the root of most of the frustration that follows:

"To keep your information safe, we cannot tell you which of your details we were unable to match."

So you are told the check has failed but explicitly told you cannot find out why. There is nothing on the screen to act on. The "Continue to the service" button simply returns you to Companies House, no further forward.

The one useful thing on the page is the "Contact the GOV.UK One Login team" link at the bottom. Clicking it produces a reference code — effectively an error code.

Write that reference code down before you close the window. It is the only thing a helpline can work from, and you cannot retrieve it later.

Can you just try again? No, you cannot — and this is the part that catches everybody out

This is the most important issue on this page, and it's the fact that most people don't know until it happens to them.

Once GOV.UK One Login has failed to verify you, you cannot use that route again. You cannot retry online with the same document. You cannot retry with a different document. And — the part that genuinely surprises people — you cannot fall back on the Post Office option either.

The reason is structural. The Post Office route is not a separate service. It is Route 3 inside GOV.UK One Login: you enter your photo ID details online through One Login first, download a customer letter, and only then attend a branch. If the GOV.UK One Login has already rejected you, you cannot get to the point of generating the required letter.

To be clear about where this comes from: Companies House does not publish a retry or lock-out policy on GOV.UK. This is what the government helpline tells callers, and it’s consistent with what directorverifications.com’s customers report to us every week. It is not in the official guidance, which is precisely why so many directors discover it the hard way.

The practical takeaway: do not keep retrying. Every failed attempt narrows your options rather than widening them.

Can a helpline fix it?

There are two different helplines, and people frequently ring the wrong one.

• Companies House — 0303 1234 500. Open Monday to Friday, 8:30am to 6pm UK time.
• GOV.UK One Login support — 0300 373 9020 from the UK, or +44 208 629 0008 from outside the UK. Open Monday to Friday, 8am to 8pm UK time.

Companies House can help with your company record and your filing obligations. GOV.UK One Login is the service that actually ran the identity check and rejected you, so that is the one to call about the verification itself.

Be prepared to wait. Twenty to thirty minutes is normal depending on the time of day.

Here’s the brutally honest answer about what calls to these numbers will achieve – it’s absolutely nothing whatsoever. If the government system has already failed to verify you, the helplines cannot reset it. They cannot clear the failed attempt, they cannot let you try again with a different document, and they cannot manually verify your identity. What they will tell you — and this is consistent with every customer account we hear — is that your only remaining route is to verify your ID via a third-party ACSP.

That is a frustrating phone call to make, with an even more frustrating — infuriating, even — outcome. It is worth knowing in advance what the outcome will be, so you don't waste your time on hold expecting a different, favourable result. A favourable outcome simply will not happen.

The 8 most common reasons Companies House ID verification fails

Reason 1: You used a non-UK ID document

This is the single biggest cause of rejection we see, and it is the one the official guidance does the most to obscure.

On paper, GOV.UK One Login accepts non-UK passports. In practice, non-UK documents are rejected constantly — and there are three separate reasons why:

• The GOV.UK One app only reads chips. It verifies a passport by scanning the biometric chip over NFC. Non-UK passports vary enormously in how their chips are implemented, and the app frequently cannot read them even when the chip is present and perfectly valid.
• Most non-UK documents aren't on the list at all. No EU, Norwegian, Icelandic or Liechtenstein national identity cards. No non-UK driving licence. No machine-readable passport without a chip.
• The fallbacks don't work either. The security-questions route needs a UK financial history. The Post Office route needs you to be physically standing (queueing!) in a British post office.

The result is perverse: the people who most need a reliable route — overseas directors of UK companies — are the ones the government system fails most often, and they are frequently left with no GOV.UK option at all.

How to fix this big problem: ACSPs are not affected by any of these issues. directorverifications.com accepts machine-readable passports with no chip, EU biometric national identity cards, EU photocard driving licences, Irish passport cards, work permits and visas — verified remotely, from wherever you are in the world. Two specific versions of this problem cause more trouble than any other — a passport with no biometric chip, and an EU national identity card. Both are covered in detail further down this page.

Reason 2: Your name or date of birth doesn't match

Among people using UK documents, this is the most common cause by some distance. If the name or date of birth on your Companies House record does not match your identity document exactly, the check fails. A missing middle name, a dropped hyphen, an anglicised spelling, a married name on one and a maiden name on the other — any of these is enough to reject you.

How to fix it: Before anything else, log into the Companies House register and compare your details against your ID document character by character. If they differ, update your Companies House record first and wait for the change to process before attempting your ID verification.

Reason 3: You used an expired or unsupported document

The GOV.UK One Login route accepts a specific and fairly narrow list. Through the GOV. UK One Login app, that is:

• a UK passport
• a UK photocard driving licence
• a non-UK passport — only if it has a biometric chip (but, in practice, non-UK passports will be rejected even if they have a biometric chip)
• a UK Biometric Residence Permit (BRP) — accepted up to 18 months expired
• a UK Biometric Residence Card (BRC)
• a UK Frontier Worker permit

A utility bill, a birth certificate, an older non-chipped passport or a bank statement will be rejected automatically.

How to fix it: Check the accepted list before you start. If your document is not on it, an ACSP accepts a considerably wider range — including machine-readable passports that do not have biometric chips, EU biometric national identity cards, EU photocard driving licences, Irish passport cards, and photographic work permits and visas.

Reason 4: Poor photo or scan quality

The check is automated and image quality genuinely matters. Blur, glare on a laminated surface, cropped edges or dim lighting will cause a fail even when the document itself is perfectly valid.

How to fix it: Use even, natural light. Do not stand with a bright window or lamp behind you. Keep the whole document inside the frame. If the preview looks unclear, retake it before submitting — but, be warned, you do not get unlimited attempts.

Reason 5: Your phone is too old, or has no NFC reader

This one is badly under-explained by the official guidance. The GOV.UK ID Check app verifies a passport by reading the chip using your phone's NFC reader. No NFC, no read. The app also needs a reasonably modern handset — broadly iPhone 8 or newer on iOS 16.7+, or Android 10+.

An older phone will often fail the document scan or the liveness check with no useful error message provided at all.

How to fix it: Try a newer device and update your software first. Or sidestep the problem entirely — an ACSP such as directorverifications.com needs no app and no NFC, and works from a laptop or desktop camera just as well as a smartphone camera.

Reason 6: You're using a shared or conflicting email address

Only one email address can be attached to a GOV.UK One Login. If you are using a shared company inbox, your PA's address, a family member's address or an address already linked to somebody else's One Login, you get an account conflict that stops the process dead.

Fix it by using your own personal email address. If you have used a different address for other GOV.UK services, you may need to resolve that conflict before verification will run at all.

Reason 7: You've already failed once on GOV.UK One Login

Covered in full above, but it belongs on this list because it is the reason a great many people end up with no option but to use an ACSP. If GOV.UK One Login has rejected you once, the government route is closed — both online and at the Post Office.

How to fix it: the only way to fix this is to use an ACSP such as directorverifications.com. This is not a workaround or a loophole; it is one of the two routes Companies House itself provides, and it is explicitly available from any country in the world.

Reason 8: A fault on the GOV.UK side

Sometimes it genuinely is not your fault. There have been consistent reports of unexplained technical errors since mandatory verification launched — correct details, valid document, supported device, and the GOV.UK One Login route still fails to verify your ID.

How to fix it: If a second attempt at a different time of day does not work, stop. Each additional failure narrows your options. An ACSP bypasses the GOV.UK system entirely.

Two traps that catch out non-British directors

Reason 1 (above) covers the general problem. These are the two specific versions of it that cause the most issues:

Trap 1: The non-biometric passport

This one is genuinely unfair. A machine-readable passport without an electronic chip appears on the list of documents Companies House says it accepts. But the GOV.UK One Login app verifies a passport by scanning the chip over NFC. No chip means there is nothing to scan — so in practice these passports are frequently rejected by the very system that is supposed to accept them.

This catches out anyone with an older or non-chipped passport, and it is a clear gap between what Companies House states it accepts and what its automated system can actually read.

An ACSP is not affected by this. The verification partner used by directorverifications.com validates a machine-readable passport by checking its physical security features, so a missing chip is no obstacle.

Trap 2: The EU national identity card

The GOV.UK One Login app does not accept EU, Norwegian, Icelandic or Liechtenstein national identity cards at all. The security-questions route requires a UK financial history, so it is effectively closed to anyone without UK bank accounts, mortgages or credit agreements. The Post Office route does accept national ID cards — but requires you to stand and queue in a British post office in person.

A very large number of EU citizens hold a national identity card but no passport whatsoever. For that director, living in Warsaw or Lisbon or Dublin or wherever, there is no GOV.UK route that works. An ACSP is not just the more convenient option — it’s the only option that exists.

Our guides on  ID verification for non-British passport holders  and  why ID verification is needed for non-UK citizen company directors  go into more detail.

If you haven't tried yet: a short pre-flight checklist

If you are reading this before attempting verification — good. Five minutes here saves you from a locked-out GOV.UK One account later.

1. Check your details match. Compare the name and date of birth on your Companies House record against your ID document and make sure it exactly matches.
2. Check your document is on the list of accepted documents, and that any expiry tolerance is okay.
3. Use a modern smartphone with NFC to use the GOV.UK One app, and update the software on your smartphone first.
4. Use your own email address, not a shared or company one.
5. Do not leave it until the last moment before a filing deadline. If the government route fails, you need time to go through an ACSP instead.

And the honest advice: if you hold a non-UK document, or an older phone, or a non-chipped passport, consider going straight to an ACSP such as directorverifications.com rather than risking being rejected by the GOV.UK One Login and locked out of it for weeks afterwards.

How verification through directorverifications.com works

directorverifications.com is a Companies House-approved ACSP. It is the trading name of Finovium Limited, a firm of accountants, tax and business advisers based in Chelsea, West London, with over ten years' experience, AML supervision, ICO registration and HMRC tax agent authorisation.

Step 1 — Choose your service. Standard is £24.99, completed within 24–48 hours. Fast Track is £39.99, guaranteed same day when ordered by 5pm, seven days a week.

Step 2 — Provide your details via our website. Your full name, date of birth, home address and an email address. Use an email address you can access — Companies House emails your personal code directly to you, not to us.

Step 3 — Scan your document and your face. Once you've registered your details with us and paid, we'll immediately send you an auto-generated email with a "Start Verification" button. Use this link to scan your ID document and your face. There is no app to install and you will not need a GOV.UK One Login account at any point in the process. You can use a smartphone camera, or a laptop or desktop PC camera. Our verification partner uses enterprise-grade, AI-based biometric technology accredited to ISO 27001, eIDAS 2.0, ETSI, IEEE 2089.1-2024, NIST Level 1 & 2 PAD and ISO 30107-3. In the rare cases the AI cannot confirm your ID, a trained person reviews it rather than simply rejecting you — unlike the GOV.UK One Login route, which will simply reject anyone that cannot be matched.

Step 4 — We submit to Companies House. We file your verified ID data through the official Companies House ACSP portal.

Step 5 — Companies House emails your 11-character personal code. This is sometimes sent straight away or, if not, within a few hours. Check your spam folder if it does not arrive.

If you are an accountant, solicitor or formation agent with several people to verify, we offer a bulk director verification service.

What happens after you're verified

You receive your unique  Companies House personal code  — an 11-character identifier formatted XXX-XXXX-XXXX. It belongs to you as a person, not to any company. You only need to verify once; your personal code can be used for every directorship you hold.

You then have to connect your 11-character personal code to each role you hold:

• As a director — provide it in your company's next confirmation statement filing.
• As a PSC — provide it separately through the "Provide identity verification details for a PSC" service, within your 14-day window.

If you are both a director and a PSC of the same company, you verify once but submit the code twice, once in each capacity. And note that a company cannot file its confirmation statement unless every one of its directors is verified — one unverified colleague blocks the whole filing.

Full detail is in our guide to the Companies House personal code.

Get verified today

A rejected verification is a setback, not a dead end — but it does close the free route, so the sooner you move the better.

Get verified with us for £24.99 (or fast track, same day for £39.99) or contact the team  if you want to check your document qualifies first.

Frequently Asked Questions