e-Sec Announcement - New Companies Act

The New Companies Act will affect all of us, GreatSoft are on target to deliver the reports you need!

After a number of delays with the roll out of the new Companies Act No 71 of 2008 and related regulations and forms, it appears the DTI and Cipro are pushing ahead with going live on 1 April 2011.

The new Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (The Commission) will be established on 25 March 2011 to implement and administer the legislation. The Commission will replace Cipro and a new web site will be launched on 1 April 2011. It is expected that from 01 April 2011, all applications must be submitted on the new "COR" forms and must comply with the new Companies Act.

During the training workshops we conducted in May 2010 with Adv Rory Voller (Director Legal and Regulatory Services CIPRO) and Dr Mkhuseli Vimba (Director Education Services DTI) on the new Companies Act, firms highlighted a number the challenges faced with the implementation.  These are still relevant today and include:

1.  Amendments to the new Companies Act need to be passed by parliament.  The Parliament's portfolio committee on trade and industry adopted the Companies Amendment Bill on 8 March 2011 and expressed confidence in meeting the deadlines.  The National Assembly was scheduled to meet and formally consider the bill on 9 March 2011.  Thereafter, the Bill needs to be signed by the President and gazetted. 2.  Final regulations and Forms need to be completed and published.  This is expected to be finalised around 25 March 2011 - 4 days before going live!  This gives very little time for us vendors to apply the final changes to the new forms; brings back memories of August 2010..! 3.  Regulatory and enforcement institutions need to be transformed or established for Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, Companies Tribunal, Financial Reporting Standards Council and the Takeover Regulation Panel.  The Commission will be established on 25 March 2011 and will take over operations on 1 April 2011.  Very little information and guidelines are available at this time regarding the new processes, forms and rules. 4.  Key elements of the IT Systems upgrade will need to be completed and improvements in the performance of the Cipro web site are long overdue.  The bungled IT upgrade contract, which is still the subject of legal action, caused major delays with the system upgrade.  The new web site is expected to be ready on 1 April 2011 and is likely to  be a key source for all educational documents and lodgements under the new Companies Act.

With just 3 weeks to the go-live date, some of the milestones appear quite challenging and there is very little time for businesses to react once the final amendments are released.   From 1 April 2011 the new Commission takes over operations from Cipro and firms are advised to lodge the following documents as soon as possible before 31 March 2011 to avoid frustrations during the transition: o Outstanding Annual Returns o Restoration requests for de-registrations o Name reservation requests o Application for new CC's as no new CC registrations will be accepted after 1 April 2011 o Utilise agents account balance as far as possible.  Agents will need to register again under The Commission. GreatSoft new Forms project I am pleased that we made the decision over a year ago to develop a new forms module using the old CM forms.  Our objective was to pre-empt exactly the scenario playing out now where there will be very little time between the release of the final forms and the go-live date.  This module is complete and is implemented with test sites using the old forms.  We have also created the key new Company Formation forms and expect to complete the initial testing phase with our test sites before the final forms are published.  The draft forms published by Cipro were clearly rushed as a number of errors were not detected by the developers. Once the final versions of the new forms are published on 25 March 2011 we will update the changes and continue with quality assurance at the test sites. If the Cipro release occurs on schedule, we expect to be able to release the new Forms module with the COR Company Formation forms before the end of April 2011. We are also busy making the necessary arrangements to launch another e-Sec workshop series on the new Companies Act following on the success of the sessions we conducted last year.  These will be held at the end of April to coincide with the release of the new Forms module.  Further information will be published once the arrangements are finalised.

Should you have any advice or suggestions for the software or workshops please send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it with your suggestions and we will follow these up.

Thank You

Regards

Imtiaz Lorgat