Businesses To Face Sanctions For Non-renewal Of License

The Registrar General’s Department (RGD) has announced it will sanction companies that default in re-registering their businesses.

The Public Relations Officer of the Department, Constance Takyi, disclosed this yesterday when she spoke on Citifm’s Business Today.

She also stated that businesses that fail to re-register after the expiration of their businesses will be knocked out of the RGD registration list.

“We have given ample time. We have given over two years for people to do this. If you are in the old database, come and renew and re-register and let us know that you are doing active business, so as part of the press release that we sent, we said that after a period we are going to begin striking out the names”, she said.

According to her, the Registrar General’s Department has the power to strike out names of businesses that are dormant in its database.

The caution comes ahead of an October-ending deadline for defaulting companies to update their records with the department.

Even though existing laws stipulate clear penalties for businesses that default, the RGD has decided on a flat penalty rate of three hundred Ghana cedis (GH¢300) per company.

Per law, Limited Liability Companies are expected to file their annual returns every eighteen months (11/2 years) while Sole proprietors are to renew their registrations yearly.

The exercise forms part of moves by the Registrar General’s Department to improve upon its operations.

Meanwhile, the Department yesterday launched the electronic certificate registration programme, which forms part of moves to reduce the turnaround time of registering businesses.

With this, clients will be able to print their certificates, forms and profiles from the comfort of their homes and offices or wherever they may be.

Additionally, the feature would reduce the number of clients who throng the Department’s offices nationwide to process their documents.

11,000 transactions recorded

Meanwhile online transactions at the Registrar General’s Department (RGD) has seen tremendous growth with more than 11,000 transactions recorded from January to September this year.

This is an increase from mere 102 online transactions in 2015 and about 3000 in 2016. The growth follows the RGD’s successful implementation of the online registration of companies, as well as the authorization of operations of businesses.

Data also indicate that over 60,000 businesses and companies registered with RGD in the period from January to September this year, compared to a 54,000 for the whole of 2016.

Revenue generated by September 2017 stood at 44 million Ghana Cedis, already matching that collected from January to December 2016.

These functions are supported by a number of online services, including the e-Shop which allowed company searches, reservation of company names and the booking of marriage ceremonies amongst others. This has resulted in significant uptake by Ghanaian businesses using the paperless system.

The Head of IT at the Registrar-Generals Department, Mrs Doris Ampadu-Ameyaw explained that businesses could conduct their end-to-end business registration on the RGD portal, resulting in the issuance of an e-certificate.

“Linked to the RGD portal is a fully functional epayment platform which allows payments to be made in the course of online transactions. This is in line with Government’s commitment to deepen leveraging technology to improve the ease of doing business in Ghana and to enhance the business competitiveness of the country,” she said.

Mrs. Ampadu-Ameyaw said an interesting new feature introduced to the automation of the RGD processes was the deployment of the e-shop information platform, which facilitates the search or requests for data regarding companies registered in Ghana.

She said in line with the commitment to enhance and enrich customer experience the outfit was in the process of implementing a queue management system at the front office to improve the customer experience.

This she said would give true meaning to the ease of doing business.

The e-certificate and e-shop platforms are end to end registration portals developed and deployed by GCNet as part of the broad World Bank sponsored e-Gov project.

It leverages ICT opportunities to generate employment enhancement and growth under the eGov application for the Revenue Generating Agencies and the Registrar General’s Department.

RGD systems are integrated with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) with plans to advance to link up with Ghana Investment Promotion Centre in the exchange of data to facilitate the ease of doing business in Ghana.

The data exchange is to encourage a paperless registration and tax regime aimed at significantly reducing administrative and operational overhead costs.

It will greatly ease doing business, while maximising revenue mobilisation for accelerated development. The e-Certificate is expected be launched on 19th October, 2017.

Source: thePublisher