Insolvency Service – About us | Civil Service Careers

Make it count

The Insolvency Service is an executive Government agency. We’re responsible for the UK’s world-class insolvency regime.

Insolvency happens when a person or company cannot pay their debts. Our work helps minimise the impact of this on the UK economy.

Our main objective is to deliver economic confidence. That means making sure the economy is fair.

We do this in three ways:

tackling financial wrongdoing
supporting people in financial distress
maximising returns to creditors

We deal with thousands of insolvency cases every year. No two cases are the same, so our workload is always varied.

When you join us, you’ll be welcomed by colleagues with a range of experiences. From graduates straight out of university to seasoned ex-police officers, former lawyers and teachers to data and accounting specialists.

This mix of perspectives and expertise is our biggest strength.

Whatever role you’re in, we offer fantastic career opportunities – as many of our staff with over a decade of experience here will tell you.

Our strategic objectives

Find out more about what we do and why we do it

Show video transcript

00:02 [Working at the Insolvency Service – How we meet our strategic objectives – East Midlands Regional Centre]
00:05 [Liam McClelland – Investigator, Enforcement group] Hi, I'm Liam McClelland and I’m an Insolvent Company Investigator with the Insolvency Service, part of the Enforcement division.
00:13 [Stephen Hetterley – Investigator, Redundancy Payments Service] My name is Stephen Hetterley, I work for the Redundancy Payments Service as part of the Insolvency Service.
00:19 [Karen Baldock – Deputy Official Receiver, Insolvency group] My name is Karen Baldock. I've been in the Insolvency Service since 2008. I currently work in the Public Interest Unit as a Deputy Official Receiver and Senior Examiner.
00:30 [Liam] My day-to-day job within enforcement is looking at companies that have gone into liquidation. I specifically look at civil investigations and sometimes I will need to make a criminal referral and we have a separate criminal team and mainly it's looking at risk and counter fraud.
00:44 [Karen] I receive cases where complaints have been made against live companies that are trading, potentially fraudulently because the Official Receiver takes on the responsibility of the company as soon as it's wound-up, if it’s trading we would often have to go out and close the company down, deal with any employees who might be at the company, secure any assets, secure books and records for the company and we can actually make claims against the Directors.
01:10 [Stephen] We pay redundancies when companies are on the verge of insolvency or gone insolvent. Ultimately, it's part of the wider objective, we help resolve the financial distress that a company and its people can be in by paying them properly and correctly on time, as quickly as we possibly can.
1:29 [Liam] So between 2024 and 2025 we've disqualified over a thousand company directors and we've made almost 200 criminal investigations. A lot of the wrongdoing that we see company directors doing is failing to pay HMRC. So that's either the tax from sales, or passing on National Insurance contributions. Sometimes it's keeping their books and records, their accounting records and often cases you see referrals coming in where people have paid a deposit for a service yet that service hasn't been delivered.
2:00 [Karen] The most rewarding part of my job is actually when I'm able to trace a director and get them in for an interview and then discover assets, we weren’t aware of that we can actually recover for the benefit to the creditors. It's an interesting part of the job, depending obviously on who you deal with, some directors are more forthcoming than others. Sometimes it's actually quite hard to get hold of a director.
2:23 [Stephen] When a company goes insolvent the Redundancy Payments Service becomes a creditor, so therefore instead of it being months and nmonths and months before someone gets paid while the company is being wound-up the Redundancy Payments Service and the Insolvency Service step in, pay the redundancies and money owed now so that people can move on with their lives. Because when you've lost your job you are stressed out and you're in a rabbit in a headlight situation. Most of the time you don't get much notice so therefore, the Redundancy Payments Service can step in make the claim, take a lot of the stress away, pay you, and allow you to move on with your lives knowing that your statutory rights are protected.

Our strategic objectives

Tackling financial wrongdoing

We manage individual and corporate insolvencies, and investigate why they happened.

We take enforcement action if we find civil or criminal misconduct. Our specialist investigators regularly deal with cryptocurrency, Covid loan fraud, and abusive phoenixism. We disqualified more than 1,000 directors in 2025/26.

Supporting people in financial distress

Our services provide a vital safety net for people in financial crisis.

We issue around 40,000 debt relief orders and 80,000 Breathing Spaces every year. We also distribute around £300 million through the Redundancy Payments Service. This covers payments to workers who lose wages (or other pay) when their employer goes insolvent.