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Company Law Reform Bill [HL]

I am grateful to the noble Lord for not accepting my invitation to withdraw the amendment and for speaking to it. We share the concerns about identity theft that have been expressed, but we do not think that allocating a number to every registered audit firm would be particularly helpful. It is unlikely to make it any easier to root out false claims that a particular firm has audited a company’s accounts. The idea is that unique identifiers will be available to the public; they will not be like some authentication code or password used in electronic communications. We will of course give some thought to whether there is anything else we can do to address the problem that has been identified, either in the legislation or on an administrative level, but we do not think that the amendment would be very helpful in that regard.