All businesses and entities are required by the Office of Registrar of Companies (ORC) to submit their annual returns to the office no later than December 31. Failing to do so could result in their removal from the Companies Register.
The directive is a part of the ORC’s effort to uphold correct and trustworthy information on the nation’s firms and to remove dormant and defaulting ones from the register in compliance with the Companies Act 2019 (Act 992).
More than 110,000 inactive and defaulting firms that hadn’t submitted any annual returns in the five years following their incorporation were included on the ORC’s Register, according to the organization.
Speaking in an interview with the Ghanaian Times in Accra last week, the Public Relations Officer (PRO) for the ORC, Nicholas Ofori Obeng-Twum, indicated that the clean-up exercise which had entered the second phase would see 2,584 companies and businesses put in state of inactive and eventually struck off beginning from January 2023.
“These dormant and defaulting Companies designated as inactive cannot be electronically searched on in the registrar system and technically connotes that they don’t exist,” he said.
Mr Obeng-Twum mentioned companies and entities both private and Limited by Shares, and by Guarantee as Schools, Churches, Associations, Fun Clubs, NGO’s Foreign/Domestic, Foundations, Civil Society Groups (CSOs), Councils, and Charity Groups.
Sanctions, according to the PRO, the Companies Act 2019 (Act 992), Section 289 (5) implies that “a company can be struck off the register if it fails to file its annual returns on time or fails to notify the Registrar of Companies of a change in its registered office or principal place of business in a timely manner”.
Meanwhile, the ORC has directed all companies to file the appropriate ‘Suffix or Ending’ for their Companies and adopt a ‘Constitution’ to replace the ‘Regulation’ in accordance with Section 24,25,27 and 301 of the Companies Act 2019 (Act 992) by end December 2022.
The filing of change of name is necessary to help differentiate between Public and Private Companies to halt private companies taking in Public funds and forstall public deceptions and for easy identification of the type of Company and entity they are.
He advised the public to be vigilant against fraudsters parading themselves as officers of the ORC and directing people to send momo or risk being ‘cancelled’ from the companies register.