An evidential standard for the transmission of a distressed business file to a licensed insolvency practitioner. Six gates, four verdicts, one dated artefact per file.
First issued 15 November 2025, following engagement with the Financial Conduct Authority and the Solicitors Regulation Authority on their structured terms through which the compliance parameters behind it were established. This edition, BPCS / 2026.01.
When a director first brings a company to a practitioner, what arrives is usually a conversation, a set of filed accounts up to twenty one months old, and whatever the director says on the day.
Each gate tests against a source record. Where an artefact never existed, the standard reports its absence rather than manufacturing it. Attestation is not an artefact.
The subject is resolved to a registered entity, with company number, live status and registered office matched to the register as at the issue date. Trading name alone does not resolve an entity.
Fails onno number resolved, a number that does not correspond to the business described, or a status the register does not support.
The person completing the passport is evidenced as a director or an authorised officer of that entity at the date of completion. Evidenced, not asserted.
Fails ona completer who cannot be tied to the appointed officers, a resigned officer, or an intermediary completing on the business's behalf without a recorded authority.
The client directed the transmission to the named firm, on a dated record, with the contact permission and the introduction permission captured as two separate acts rather than one combined consent.
Fails ona single bundled permission, an introduction made without the second act, or a transmission for which no client instruction exists.
The declared position as at the completion date, unaltered since issue, with every field carrying its evidence class on the face of the record. What the director stated is marked as stated.
Fails onalteration after issue, a field whose evidence class cannot be established, or a declaration reconstructed after the fact.
Where the file carries a claim as an estate asset, the claim traces to an evidenced origination on the same test the Claim Passport Certificate Standard applies on the consumer side. A quantum without a provenance is a number, not an asset.
Fails onan origination that cannot be evidenced, a chain broken by an originator that has since gone, or a value asserted without a basis.
The claim is tested against multi point accrual to establish whether it has already been advanced elsewhere, regardless of who advanced it, who originated it or which entity holds it now. The outcome is reported with a confidence position and the supporting evidence attached.
Fails ona live advance elsewhere, or a conflict the record cannot resolve.
Gates 01, 02 and 03 fix the outcome regardless of anything else the file holds. A passport that cannot establish the entity, the authority of the person declaring, or the client's own instruction to transmit is uncertifiable, whatever its score on the remaining three.
That is deliberate. Those three are the questions an office holder is answerable for, and no volume of supporting detail substitutes for them.
Set the position on each gate. The verdict follows the rules stated on this page.
An illustration of the verdict rules. It certifies nothing and scores no real file.
All six gates satisfied. The artefact issues with the full evidence class map and a validation reference.
The three determining gates are satisfied and one or more of gates 04 to 06 carries a stated exception. The exception travels with the artefact and is named, not summarised away.
The position could not be established because the record does not exist, rather than because it is adverse. Absence is reported as absence.
A determining gate is not satisfied. The file does not certify and no artefact issues.
Each certified or qualified passport produces a single artefact carrying:
A certificate that blurs what was checked against what was said is worth less than no certificate at all, because it invites reliance it cannot carry. Each field is marked.
Every position recorded in a certificate is classified as VERIFIED, REPORTED or WOLF ASSESSMENT, and the classification travels with the artefact.
A dated declaration by a director of their own arrears, demands and called guarantees is evidence of what that director knew, and when.
That question sits at the centre of antecedent transaction work and of any argument about the point at which a director should have concluded there was no reasonable prospect of avoiding an insolvent outcome. It is ordinarily reconstructed afterwards, from correspondence, bank records and recollection, at considerable cost and with a contested result.
A certified passport fixes it contemporaneously, in the director's own hand, before an appointment exists and before anyone has an interest in the answer. No product built on filed data can produce it, because filed data records the company, not the director's own account of what they knew on a given day.
Whether a claim carried on the file vests in the estate, and whether the office holder can pursue it, is a legal question. The standard records the asset and its provenance. It does not determine vesting.
The standard is applied to passports arising from two distinct layers, and the distinction matters to anyone relying on the artefact.
A business holding a passport account raises its own hand, completes the structured request, selects a firm and transmits. The declaration is the client's act throughout. No record is released by any other route.
Separately, a probability model scores distress across the whole UK business population by area, sector and size, from public data. It identifies where distress sits. It names nobody, and it forms no part of any certificate.
The two are held apart by design. A modelled score is never written into a certified field, and a certified declaration is never presented as a modelled output. Where the layers are read together, the reading is an assessment and is labelled as one.
Certification is held independently of the case management layer. Where the party that originated the volume also supplies the system holding the origination records, the record and its author trace back to one party, and no audit within that arrangement is independent of it.
Provenance and authority evidence sit with the entity and its officers. Where a company is wound up, struck off or dissolved, and its officers disperse, the record of who held office and what they declared goes with it. Certification carried out while the entity is live is recoverable. The same exercise attempted afterwards is not, at any price.
An insolvency practitioner in the United Kingdom is authorised and regulated by one of three recognised professional bodies, each recognised for the purposes of section 391 of the Insolvency Act 1986.
The Insolvency Service is the oversight regulator. The Secretary of State holds a set of oversight sanctions over the recognised bodies, introduced into the Insolvency Act 1986 by the Small Business, Enterprise and Employment Act 2015, and the bodies account to the Insolvency Service for how they supervise their own members. The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants ceased to be a recognised professional body with effect from 1 March 2021 and no longer licenses practitioners.
The certificate imposes no obligation on the practitioner and creates no regulatory status. It is built so that a file arriving under it supports obligations the office holder already carries.