Cipro's technical woes hamper its provision of services

Visitors to the homepage of the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (Cipro) will notice a large red error message. Glitches with the Cipro website have been occurring on a regular basis since December, meaning that users have been hindered, amongst other things, in submitting their annual returns electronically, for more than a month now.

Now, the situation is even worse than in the past - visitors to www.cipro.co.za or www.cipro.gov.za are blocked from entry to the site.

Despite acknowledging the problems, Cipro clearly has not resolved them. In December, Cipro released a statement admitting that it was experiencing severe "computer network and infrastructure" related problems. This resulted in customers "being thrown off the website". The fact that the website still does not appear to work is troubling.

It is equally concerning is that the extent of the problem forced Cipro to waive its prescribed penalties for the late submission of returns during December 2009.

Being a trading entity, Cipro should generate its own income. Both annual return and penalty fees make up a significant amount of this income. These fees had to be waived several times during the past year due to continuous network malfunction.

Prior to the current error message, the website offered Cipro's "apologies" for the severe backlogs in its procedures for the registration of businesses and name reservations. This is despite the fact that Cipro claimed that name reservations were automated last year after the exposé on fraudulent name reservations.

Most of the cited backlogs are five times the average turnaround time achieved in the past. It also makes a mockery of the internal targets set in terms of the Quality Assurance system of Cipro, an IS-O9000 accredited company. What makes matters worse is that these backlogs escalated at a time of decreased economic activity.

The website claimed that staff would be working overtime in order to catch up on the backlogs. Overtime work is costing Cipro millions every year, while one in every four posts is vacant. Yet all staff was sent on compulsory leave in December when the offices of Cipro closed down over the festive season.

The public expect of government institutions to support, and not hinder, economic recovery. Cipro is currently unable to render the effective and swift service needed by new business ventures to grow the economy. These problems make one wonder how the proposed stricter governance measures, once the new Companies Act is introduced, will be enforced by Cipro. While Cipro is to be commended for going public about some of its shortcomings, urgent action is clearly needed to put matters right.

Many of the problems at Cipro are infrastructure related. The Office of the Auditor General has recently indicated that the report on the controversial allocation of the Electronic Content Management tender, will be submitted to parliament in two weeks' time. This report will focus on the procurement of computer-related services to the value of R153million from a small and inexperienced close corporation by the name of ValorIT CC. This after earlier media reports stated that the office of the Auditor General has indicated that the report would have been finalised in December 2009. The DA is urgently awaiting the outcome of this report. I will, in the meantime, be submitting questions to Dr. Rob Davies, the Minister of Trade and Industry, on the operational problems of Cipro. These questions will hopefully convince the department to intervene, in order to restore full functionality at Cipro.

Statement issued by Andricus van der Westhuizen, MP, Democratic Alliance deputy shadow minister of trade and industry, January 14 2010

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