Query Regarding Identifying Active and Inactive Officers in the API

API Issues
1

Hello Companies House Team,

I am working with the Officers API. Currently, the API response includes an inactive_count value indicating the total number of inactive officers. However, the individual officer records in the payload do not contain any flag or field to show whether a specific officer is inactive.

Is there currently any way to determine which officers are active or inactive from the API data? If not, are there any plans to include such a flag or indicator in future API responses?

2

I think you’re looking for the resigned_on member - if that exists and contains a date, that means that the office resigned! If not present - the officer is active.

Documentation here (individual, officers list).

You may ask about edge cases e.g. “what happens if an office resigns, then rejoins?” I am not from Companies House so I don’t know whether they’d create a new officer entry, or just reset the field!

3

Thanks for your reply.

I just wanted to confirm if it’s possible to have Active, Inactive, and Resigned officers in the same company record. I can identify Resigned officers from the resigned_on date, but I’m not sure how to differentiate Active and Inactive officers is this based on the company status? Since both Active and Inactive do not have a resigned_on date.

4

Again - note I’m not from Companies House - do your own checks!

What are “Inactive” officers?

As far as I’m aware an officer is either:

  • active e.g. Companies House has recorded that they have been appointed to a role (so there is an appointed date - see below - but no resigned_on date).
  • resigned - so there is both an appointed date - see note below - and a resigned_on date

The Company Officers List gives you a counts of:

active_count
resigned_count
total_results

As I understand it total_results should always equal active_count plus resigned_count

Companies can have a range of different statuses - which should be listed when you request from the Officer Appointments endpoint for a given officer. However that doesn’t relate to officer status.

Hope that helps.

Note: for officers appointed before 1992 a different field is used for the appointment date - see the documentation.

5

You may ask about edge cases e.g. “what happens if an office resigns, then rejoins?” I am not from Companies House so I don’t know whether they’d create a new officer entry, or just reset the field!

Just catching up and realised I had access to this edge case and the director in question has two separate entries one with appoint/resign dates and the second with just appoint date.

Disclaimer: no idea if it always works this way!

1 Like
6

Thanks! That seems similar to some things we’d noticed in the PSC data some time back.