The backlogs created by technical problems with its IT system will not take long to resolve, says the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC).
The CIPC has also denied reports that a backlog in company registrations exists, but admits to a backlog in name reservations.
According to Astrid Ludin, commissioner at CIPC, the organisation is well within its published service delivery standards concerning company registrations, which are 25 working days for manual applications and five days for electronic.
"The CIPC does have a backlog in name reservations and we are not within our published service delivery standard of three days," says Ludin. "The current turnaround time is about 10 working days. We have published a notice in this regard and have indicated to the public that a name is not necessary to register a company."
According to a report by The Star newspaper, the CIPC computer system has only been accessible on a limited and intermittent basis since the end of April. However, Ludin says the system has been fully operational since Friday last week.
She explains that the CIPC experienced three unrelated incidents over a period of three weeks, which affected different systems. "About four weeks ago, we experienced a problem with our name search engine, which affected our ability to approve names and name reservations. The problem was fixed in the same week," says Ludin.
The following weekend, the Annual Return system was brought down to implement scheduled maintenance that had been communicated to the public two weeks in advance. "When we brought the systems back up on Monday, we experienced problems. It took us three days to bring the Annual Return system back up."
The weekend that followed, a power failure at the Department of Trade and Industry's campus brought down the systems of all the organisations on the campus, says Ludin. Due to old hardware supporting some of the CIPC's legacy systems, the commission experienced problems with hardware and data correction. "We were able to replace the critical hardware and restore the systems within four days. We have continued with our planned procurement to replace all the old hardware."
According to Ludin, the backlog of changes to memorandums of incorporation (MOI) will take longer to resolve, as the CIPC has received large volumes of requests for such changes, pending the 30 April cut-off for free MOI changes. "We have a total of 24 000 applications, that have been logged manually," says Ludin. "We have posted a notice to indicate that our service delivery standard will be 30 working days."
In response to a query regarding companies that were mistakenly deregistered due to the system failure, Ludin says a "very small number of companies" were deregistered in February, as a result of miscommunication between two databases. The mistake was, however, quickly corrected.
Ludin explains the CIPC has now placed companies that have been non-compliant for at least three years in deregistration. "Many waited to the last minute to file their outstanding returns. Some companies who filed on the day before the maintenance of the Annual Return system were not unlocked on the system. We have committed to correct these errors and also that we will only affect final deregistrations at the end of June, to give people enough time."
Ludin says the CIPC has a programme in place to upgrade its IT hardware and infrastructure during the rest of the year. While the upgrades will inevitably have an impact on its systems, it will try to minimise the negative effects on the filing public.
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