E – ROC faces erasing out system issues
The E-ROC, the electronic system of the Registrar of Companies (ROC) designed to ‘ease’ the paperwork and red-tape, has in fact become a major nightmare for companies and their company secretaries.
The system that was touted as South Asia’s most sophisticated, national scale hi-tech electronic company registration system has created a backlog since last August when the trouble actually started. That is when the RoC directed companies to file all 2020 annual returns (which essentially deal with all corporate information of a company starting from its incorporation). “It was really difficult to obtain the relevant link to upload these documents.
Trying to get the link went on at least for a month,” a top official at a secretarial firm explained to the Business Times. He cited the reason for this being a load the information systems provider cannot ‘cope’ with.
Another company secretary said that most companies and their secretarial firms had misunderstood that the RoC was to feed this information, which ultimately wasn’t the case. The link was given but there still seems to be lack of clarity in certain processes. For instance to correct the mistakes in the names and registration numbers of companies (which are some of the few things the RoC uploads in the system), the RoC goes back and forth with the relevant companies and ‘at times they don’t respond’, was what an exasperated company secretary told the Business Times. “Often at times the same companies need to remind the RoC pertaining to the corrections.” Some company secretaries banded together and wrote to the RoC addressing many of these issues over the past six months but the response has been slow.