NOTES OF MEETING WITH THE CIPRO – 23 February 2006

The following is a summary of the main items discussed at a meeting between representatives from various bodies, including CSIG, and the Acting Registrar of Companies and senior CIPRO staff on 23 February 2006.

CIPRO Website and Speed Access

There has been no change on the CIPRO website or speed access to the site. This problem has been ongoing for the past three years. It is the result of inadequate bandwidth which SITA and TELKOM had undertaken to resolve by November 2005 but had yet to address. The CIPRO CIO and the DTI CIO had met with representatives from TELKOM and still no progress had been made. The matter remains unresolved and will be taken to ministerial level.

CIPRO/SARS

Communication between SARS and CIPRO was proving to be problematic. Senior CIPRO and SARS staff have met regularly, though it was not clear if SARS was filtering down the information received from CIPRO. Information on the SARS system was often incorrect even though CIPRO sends uploads to SARS every night.

Annual Returns

The deadline date of 28th February 2006 for the submission of annual returns would be extended. CIPRO was urged to extend the deadline for annual returns by a longer period instead of the rolling month-by-month extensions. The submissions for CC annual returns would be held over to 2007.

CIPRO Operational

The new CIPRO CEO had been appointed and would commence duties on 1st April 2006.

There have been an overwhelming number of CM5 and CK7 registrations in January 2006; additional staff had been brought in to assist in this regard.

The call centre now had 38 staff of which 8 had been newly appointed. Training was ongoing for staff that had attained low scores in the initial training. Refresher courses on customer service were also being run. Calls of a technical nature were escalating to the Knowledge team.

CIPRO has met with the banks and challenges with regard to the FICA Act had been highlighted. A Practice note will be issued by FICA for banks to accept e-certificates. Income Tax numbers would be included on the CIPRO certificates in future.

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