The topic received further attention during a House of Commons Treasury committee meeting in June, when Paul Monaghan, the chief executive of the Fair Tax Foundation, told MPs<\/a>: \u201cThere is a reason that we have a company register full of hundreds of thousands of fraudsters.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Insolvency Service has just recently shut down five illegal company service providers, which between them had set up 12,000 illegal companies in the UK, and we are only halfway through the year. We have got a problem in this country that the obsession to set it up cheap and quick creates all the other problems.\u201d<\/p>\n The SmartSearch analysis of Companies House records between 2016 and 2026 focused solely on the two business sectors of beauty and convenience stores.<\/p>\n It found 3,097 dissolved companies averaging 170 to 194 days of life, clustered into the same postcodes, the same registered addresses, and the same months of the year for incorporation and dissolution.<\/p>\n The data also showed how 83% of suspect hairdressing companies and 92% of suspect convenience stores were incorporated in the first and second quarters of each year, with more than half dissolved in the fourth quarter.<\/p>\n The cycle repeats annually across both sectors, the paper said, adding: \u201cA single area of Cardiff contains 119 suspected companies on its own, across both sectors.\u201d<\/p>\n
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