Guidance

Collect, use and exchange beneficial ownership information

Updated 9 August 2022

Use the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) v0.3 to collect, use, exchange and publish beneficial ownership information.

The UK government has committed to publishing beneficial ownership data in a structured, machine-readable format which meets the Beneficial Ownership Data Standard. If you’re publishing beneficial ownership data to GOV.UK, you must follow guidance on publishing and managing data.

1. Summary of the standard’s use for government

The Beneficial Ownership Data Standard (BODS) defines a common data format that:

• provides a consistent way to collect, use, exchange and publish beneficial ownership information
• increases transparency of who owns, controls or benefits from companies and other organisations

The government chooses standards using the open standards approval process and the Open Standards Board has final approval. Read more about the process for BODS.

If you’re in a government department or team that collects, analyses, shares or publishes beneficial ownership data, you should use BODS to structure your data. This will make your technical systems more interoperable with others, and improve collaborative work with data across government. It can also reduce the need for people who need to give data to government to give it more than once.

BODS is developed by Open Ownership, a non-profit organisation supported by the Data Standard Working Group. Organisations who want to contribute to the development of BODS can join this group.

You can keep up to date on development of BODS by visiting the standard’s website.

2. How this standard meets user needs

BODS has been assured by the Data Standards Authority and the Open Standards Board as meeting the UK government’s Open Standards Principles.

Using BODS means you can create beneficial ownership data registries in a common format across the UK government and internationally. BODS helps government:

• make sure procurement systems work competitively and with integrity by clarifying the ownership details of suppliers, as described in the Reforming Public Procurement Green Paper
• investigate and prosecute money laundering activity and follow regulations around it
• identify potential fraud by individuals or organisations which is hidden by ownership structures
• identify legal entities whose ownership structures may create risks to national security

Users of this standard are anyone in government who collects, analyses, shares or publishes beneficial ownership data. Using BODS as a shared open data standard means users can work together by sharing beneficial ownership data and developing interoperable systems.

3. How to use the standard

You can use the BODS standard to:

• create a register of beneficial ownership data
• check and review BODS data, using Open Ownership’s BODS Data Review Tool
• store machine-readable beneficial ownership data for others to analyse
• share beneficial ownership data with other government organisations
• publish beneficial ownership data

You can use Open Ownership’s BODS resources to:

• look at the data schema to find out more about the BODS data model
• read technical guidance to help you prepare and use BODS data
• find example data to help you build BODS information
• learn more about BODS’ development and current update status
• follow BODS requirements to collect and publish beneficial ownership data using BODS
• publish beneficial ownership data using BODS

Beneficial ownership data contains personal data about individuals. If you’re collecting, analysing, sharing or publishing beneficial ownership data you need to follow the Data Protection Act 2018. You can understand how to use data appropriately and responsibly by reading the Data Ethics Framework.

You need to put processes in place to handle data errors, and agree how to correct errors to make the changes clear to different audiences.

If you need to update your beneficial ownership data to correct, protect or redact sensitive information, you should make sure the information does not remain part of any publicly available data set. You can ‘overwrite’ previously-published BODS statements by republishing a corrected statement with the same statement identifier. You may choose to keep an internal or private log of these changes for your records.