CIPRO FACES UP TO SOUTH AFRICAN INSTITUTE OF PROFESSIONAL ACCOUNTANTS, PLEDGES SOLUTIONS TO CHALLENGES
03 August 2010: Faced with severe capacity challenges rendering the submission of annual returns a frustrating experience, the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (CIPRO) recently met with the South African Institute of Professional Accountants to acknowledge the issues and provide a way forward for the situation at a gathering in Pretoria last week.
The organisation's new electronic content management (ECM) system is on hold while the CIPRO website is not adequately handling the high volumes of annual returns which must be processed. This has led to increasing user frustration and discontent amongst various professional organisations. It is in this context that CIPRO met with SAIPA to explain the situation, says Navin Lalsab, Accreditation Compliance and Development Executive at the professional accounting body.
"Specifically, our members are experiencing frustration and obstruction in terms of filing statutory returns as required by the Companies Act. In effect, the challenges faced by CIPRO are compromising the ability for professional accountants to do their work effectively," Lalsab explains.
CIPRO'S head of communication, marketing and stakeholder relations, Elsabé Conradie, notes that the organisation is well aware of these difficulties, observing that if the annual returns are not filed, CIPRO assumes they are no longer in business and deregisters them.
"This fear of being deregistered has led to high volumes of annual returns being submitted, causing what is a legacy system to become overloaded. With the limitations of the system and with many entities having left things to the last minute, not everyone was able to lodge their returns successfully," she says.