CORPORATE SECRETARIAL COMPLIANCE - DON'T GET CAUGHT - IT COULD COST YOU BIG DOLLARS NOT TO MENTION YOUR SANITY
With the enactment of Clerp 7 corporate secretarial compliance became a very time consuming and tedious administration workload for practising accountants, larger organisations and ASIC agents.
Clerp 7 was implemented to improve the quality of public information stored on ASIC's company register.
Corporate compliance is no longer a once a year activity, it has now become a continuous activity all year long.
Most changes to a company register must now be notified within 28 days, including all capital and share holdings for private companies. This coupled with ASIC’s new penalty regime has resulted in many fines being issued for non-compliance especially in the area of failure to notify changes in the residential address of officeholders and members within the prescribed time of 28 days from the date of change. The penalty for this omission from officeholders is $1,100.00 and/or 3 months imprisonment.
Experience has shown that the requirement of continuous disclosure coupled with the penalties ASIC can and does impose upon late lodgements and late payment has meant that those who take on the role of compliance must be diligent, organised and have in place a workplace system which ensures that omissions and errors are kept to a minimum.
ASIC’s emphasis on computerisation to increase efficiencies has resulted in the growth of on-line lodgement of forms. The ongoing issue in this area is that if the data base of the lodging agent’s software does not exactly match the data stored with ASIC the electronic lodgement of forms will be extremely difficult and frustrating. Forms lodged with unmatched data will not be processed.
In line with ASIC’s concept of computerisation and added security, a Corporate Key was introduced by ASIC on 1st March, 2004 for display on paper forms. A record will need to be kept for the storage of the Key, as it is required on the most commonly lodged form 484. It is also required on the following additional forms 486, 362 and 492 and the Corporate Key number changes each year with the annual review.
What are your choices in dealing with ongoing corporate compliance?
Continue to provide this service in-house; or
Our Solution: OUTSOURCING CORPORATE COMPLIANCE
Click here for more information or
call 1300 267 739 (1300 CORPEX) or
email us on admin@corporateeexpress.com.au
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