Bid to improve the beleaguered CIPC
Astrid Ludin, commissioner of the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC), said she is "moving at a steady pace" to bring about change in the beleaguered organisation, despite scepticism from some quarters.
Last week the Democratic Alliance spokesman for trade and industry, Tim Harris, called for Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies to intervene in what he called "incapacity" at the CIPC, and said it was doing damage to South Africa as a business destination.
Ludin said she did not think it was wise to introduce drastic changes so soon after the body was formed last year, preferring instead " incremental changes". Since taking the job in May, she said her biggest areas of focus were stabilising the information technology function, to help ease a backlog, and improving service standards.
She said the call centre was still a huge problem.
"We get on average about 45000 calls per month and initially we had 34 people in the call centre and our call answer ratio was 46%. Then we decided to add more people but that didn't seem to have much effect," she said.
She said that from next week queries that are issue-specific will be dealt with directly by the appropriate person, instead of being left with call centre agents. She hoped this would help to streamline the call process.
She said the commission was also looking into social media tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, to improve its customer service.
Another issue that concerns the commissioner is that of company hijackings, or corporate identity theft. This is when a company's records are amended or changed for the purposes of fraud.
"In the UK they have between 50 and 100 such cases in a month, so it's a growing international trend," said Ludin. She said the commission had introduced stricter controls to try to curb this trend. Additional documentation is now required for amendment submissions and online submissions have an extra layer of password protection.
"There were 12 complaints of company hijackings lodged during January and seven of those were found to be internal disputes, while five of them are still under investigation," said Ludin.
She said small businesses find the regulatory environment a burden because compliance is not made easy.
"There is a lot of regulation that small businesses have to comply with but there is no single point for everything. This creates an element of unpredictability for the business community. What we need to seriously consider is an integrated registration and compliance process. One place where you are able to deal with the CIPC and SA Revenue Service, for instance," said Ludin.
"This will make it easier to do business in South Africa."
According to Ludin, in the past year there have been 1.2 million de-registrations of companies and CCs and the CIPC has restored less than 0.1% of them.
"De-registration could either be because businesses failed to comply in time, maybe the companies are dormant, or companies who registered hoping to get a tender and then didn't get it," said Ludin.