We spoke to Ceri Witchard, Regulator of Community Interest Companies, about the new online accounts filing service for CICs.   Transcript Gary Townley: Hello and welcome to a Companies House podcast. Thank you for downloading, or listening to this wherever you are. My name is Gary Townley. I'm part of the communications team here at Companies House. For those of you that don't know, Companies House is the agency responsible for registering and dissolving companies, collecting company information and making that information available to the public. We are sponsored by BEIS, that is, the Department for Business, Enterprise and Industrial Strategy. We have 4 offices based all around the country. So one in Belfast, one in Cardiff, one in London and the other one, which I'm trying to think of now I can't think of, but it’ll come to me in a bit.   So a slightly different podcast today, in that I'm joined by Ceri Whitchard, who’s the Regulator of Community Interest Companies. We're going to be talking this morning about account filing online, which is a new service that is being introduced fairly shortly, I believe, so hi Ceri, would you like to introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what a community interest company is?   Ceri Witchard: Yeah. Hi Gary, and thanks for having me here today. So community interest companies, or CICs, are social enterprises. So they were created in 2005 to give people a way of running a business, where they can get paid and can pay their staff but with a community benefit at its heart. So they're not charities, they are businesses, but they're set up to benefit particular groups of people or something in their community. And essentially they’re ordinary companies. They have to comply with all of the company law rules as well as some extra requirements for being CICs. They can be limited by shares, or by guarantee, and we’ve even got some on the record that are PLCs.   My office is responsible for regulating them. We check that when they set up they are genuinely going to deliver a benefit for a company and just keep a bit of a track that's going well and if we do get any complaints, we don't get very many, we do investigate just to make sure that people are doing what they say they're doing.   GT: Okay that’s great. Just the last office is in Edinburgh for anyone who's interested in that. So where is the community interest regulator based?   CW: So we're based in Cardiff. We have a small office within the Companies House building in Cardiff, which is really good for us because we obviously work closely with the teams there, including developing online services.   GT: Okay, so very much like a normal limited company do CICS have to file accounts annually?   CW: They do and it's really important that they remember this. You must file your accounts, even if your dormant, the same as any other company. And if you're a CIC, because you've got this special regulation around you alongside your accounts, you have to file your community interest report and the fee of 15 pounds.   GT: Okay. So ordinary limited companies have been able to file online for quite a while now. So why has this been produced for CICs and why is it a good option?   CW: It’s a really good option for CICs and we've been trying for a while to make sure they can benefit from the same range of services that any other company can have. As I said for a community interest company, you have to have your extra report and pay the fees. So we had to make sure all of that worked well. One of the main benefits is, we see an awful lot of CICs, they file their accounts with Companies House and they forget to attach that benefit report or to attach the fee. They come in by post, they then get rejected. It takes time for them to then meet the requirement and then they're getting a late filing penalty which obviously we don't want it's distracting them, it's an annoyance and it means they're not delivering their benefit while they're s