Meeting Notes for: CIPC Meeting with stakeholders held on 24 November 2022 at 10h00.

Agenda:

New Biz Portal
General Laws Amendment Bill – Beneficial ownership update
iXBRL update for Co-operatives
Automation updates on the e-services

1. New Biz Portal

The CIPC shared their improved, updated e-service portal with the stakeholders.

The Commissioner spoke on the improved e-service management system that is being rolled out.

Areas of focus:

Roll-out of the new, improved Biz Portal will be 05 December. Commissioner foresees that there will be teething problems for the first three months and urges all users to contact them so that they can fix these timeously.
The new payment system will be effective on 05 December – CIPC is no longer accepting monetary deposits into its account and is removing the declining balance for clients. This is a non-negotiable change as Treasury has impressed on them that the CIPC is not a deposit-taking institution.
As such, CIPC will not be operating a declining balance on the account of clients and will not accept deposits into its account. All users will need to use the new card system.
CIPC is committed to data mining and management and will be using the new Biz Portal for this added purpose so that all data is synced and capable of extraction. They are in the process of de-linking from the Department of Home Affairs so as to be more efficient in rendering their services.

2. General Laws Amendment Bill – Beneficial Ownership update

CIPC is to submit a report to the FATF by end November in preparation for a meeting with the FATF in January. CIPC expects that the Bill will move through the parliamentary processes quite quickly and that there will not be any material changes made to it. To this end, CIPC foresees that it will be providing beneficial ownership reports in respect of the Bill. Their new system should cater for this.

3. iXBRL updates

iXBRL is in place for Co-operatives for their filing of Annual Financial Statements.
The new e-services pilot for AFS’s for Co-ops is still running and will go live on 02 January 2023, when Co-ops can use this service to complete their Annual Return and upload financial statements.
CIPC confirmed that a Co-op can be reactivated once it was de-registered.

4. Automation Updates on the e-services

Areas of interest in their automation processes that were highlighted by the CIPC were the following:

The system allows for downloads of Financial statement for Disclosure requirements as long as the requisite fee of R30 is paid, which aligns with the principle of transparency that the CIPC is striving to maintain.

A company can request that their statements are private, as allowed in terms of the Companies Act, but this request for privacy is only granted by the CIPC on very good reasons. If privacy is not expressly requested, all financial statements can be accessed by any user of the system. The CIPC has, successfully in the recent past, refused such requests for privacy and have even been successful in Court in refusing such a request for privacy on such statements.

The e-system will now automatically calculate the PI score for companies based on the last filed return, NOT latest return. This may have a positive impact on the common queries around Independent Reviews and AFSs. The PI score generated by the system will trigger an automatic indication of whether an AFS or an FAS should be filed, which should alleviate some of the uncertainty around this.

With regard to the above, when submitting an Annual Return, if the answer to any of the questions in the Financial Statements section is a “YES”, it will trigger an automatic AFS submission. Conversely if all the answers in that section are a “NO” then a FAS is required.

Director amendments can be executed by uploading the Resolution document and, for the time being, this will not be audited by CIPC at this stage. No other documents presently are required for uploading by CIPC.

Auditor changes can be effected by the client and at present there is no “ACCEPT” button for an auditor to accept the appointment on the CIPC system. This can lead to practical difficulties for auditors who can be added without their knowledge. CIPC undertakes to re-examine this functionality for inclusion of this button.

Please note that the CIPC expects operational issues when their system goes live on 05 December. Be patient, use their contact details and inform them of the teething issues so that they can give it their attention.

Luthfia Kalla
Technical Adviser
25 November 2022