Abolish Companies Register search fees says key group

The Government has been urged by key stakeholders to remove the search fees on the Companies Register maintained by the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).

Barely a week after the Government announced it was scrapping the major modernisation project around the register, the members of the Modernising Business Registers Business Advisory Group urged the abolition of fees so the companies register can be more easily used by consumers.

Abolition of the search fees would cut off a revenue source to ASIC.

The Advisory Group is made up of the major accounting groups, CPA Australia, Chartered Accountants- ANZ, the Law Council of Australia, the Governance Institute of Australia and the Australian Institute of Company Directors.

The group said it believed search fees should be abolished “so all Australians can harness the information in the Companies Register to ensure they are dealing with a genuine Australian business”.

It said this would require the Companies Register to be held on a platform that can easily integrate with other existing and emerging technologies.

At the same time, however, the group argued that there needed to be de-identification of directors’ and company officers’ personal information arguing that current arrangements exposed directors and officers to undue privacy, cyber security and personal safety risks.

It said that the Director ID system represented the key identifier for directors and should be used.

“This link and public access is a vital tool to identify and prosecute creditor-defeating phoenix activity,” it said.