CAC partners FIRS to speed up company registration

Bello Mahmud, registrar-general, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), has said the commission is collaborating with the Federal Inland RevenueService (FIRS) to integrate the e-stamping module into the company registration portal to ensure seamless and speedy registration processes of companies in the country.

This is to done to ensure that people do not need to physically visit their offices again for company registration, given that it can be done online any time and day of the week.

He said this has been achieved since the launch of the commission’s Companies Registration Portal (CRP) in early 2015.

He disclosed this over the weekend in Lagos at the one-day sensitisation workshop jointly organised by the CAC and the Nigerian Bar Association’s Section on Business Law (SBL).

Mahmud, represented by Churchhill William, director of public information, CAC, 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, adding that it 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.

He said company owners can complain if they are not registered within the stipulated time, while encouraging lawyers to use the commission’s office inLagos 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, Port Harcourt and Abuja have commenced start- to- finish registration of companies without the customers coming to our head office for certificates,” he added.

Garba Abubakar, deputy director, registrar general’s office, highlighted cases of forgeries and falsification of documents by lawyers, indiscriminate queries and attitudes by staff of the commission as challenges militating against the commission, which it is striving to address.

Abubakar said Nigerians should use the company registration portal as it removes the time wasted in queuing at banks to pay.

He said there are over three million businesses since 1991 which have not been effectively and digitally covered by the commission.

Asue Ighodalo, chairman of NBA-SBL, said NBA jointly organised the workshop to raise the level of business standards and 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 setting up new businesses and how lawyers can be more effective in the processes of company registration.