The Registrar-General (RG) of the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC),Alh Bello Mahmud has said the commission is collaborating with the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) to integrate the e-stamping module into the company registration portal in its quest to ensure seamless registration processes of companies in the country.
This, as Mahmud also reiterates that the aim of the commission is to ensure that people do not have to physically visit their offices again for company registration as it can be done online any time and day of the week and achievable since the launch of the commission’s Companies Registration Portal (CRP),early in 2915.
He disclosed this in Lagos at the one-day sensitization workshop jointly organized by the CAC and the Nigerian Bar Association-Section on Business Law (SBL).
Mahmud, who was represented by the Director of Public Information, CAC, Mr Churchhill William, said the commission has also taken a giant step in providing a comfortable platform that will enable customers pay every filling fee to the Treasury Single account with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) without difficulty and has also ensured that any complaint arising from this filing regime is treated with utmost dispatch.
He said the commission as a regulator is poised to promoting business transactions in Nigeria through prompt registration of companies, processing of post-incorporation filings and providing other assistance as required under the Companies and Allied Matters Act,Cap C20,LEN,2004, adding that any company, free of query, as a law is to be registered within 24 hours by the commission.
He said company owners can complain if they are not registered within the stipulated time, as he encourages the lawyers to use the commission’s office in Lagos to file their returns instead of sending it to their Abuja office.
“As part of the reforms in the commission, the commission’s nodal offices in Enugu, Lagos, Kaduna, Kano, Portharcourt and Abuja, have commenced start to finish registration of companies without the customers coming to our head office for certificates”, he added.
The Deputy Director, Registrar General’s office, Alhaji Garba Abubakar, highlighted cases of forgeries and falsification of documents by lawyers, indiscriminate queries given by staffs and attitudes of staffs of the commission as challenges militating against the commission, which it is striving to address.Giving updates at the seminar, Abubakar said company registration has started in the country since 1912, but the commission was established, made independent in 1991 and has been able to document the records of 380,000 companies digitally, as everything was done manually before electronic introduction in 2004.
He enjoined Nigerians to use the company registration portal as it removes the time wasted in queuing at banks to pay,visiting the commission, easy to use as after filing of documents without being queried, collection of certificate is 24 hours.
He said there are over three million businesses since 1991 which has not been effectively digitally covered by the commission as it will do a validation system exercise for owners of Registered Companies (RC) to come and verify their business as some company documents are missing and could not be found, hence RC’s would be published when the exercise starts for the owners to come and verify their companies.
The Chairman of NBA-SBL, Mr Asue Ighodalo, said NBA jointly organized the workshop to raise the level of business standards, registration in the country.
Ighodalo said business law is growing in the country and the partnership with CAC will go a long way in easing the difficulties experienced by business owners in starting up new businesses and how lawyers can be more effective in the processes of company registration.