Dáil Éireann Debate, Thursday - 21 January 2021
3. Deputy Joe Flaherty asked the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment if he will engage with the Companies Registration Office, CRO, to resolve the issue of levying late fees to the original date for filing despite providing leeway for companies to file up until October 2020 (details supplied). [3036/21]
View answerThe Registrar of Companies is a statutory role and the Registrar has administrative independence in the exercise of this function.
The filing of annual returns by a company with the Registrar is a matter of law in accordance with Chapter 13 of Part 6 of the Companies Act 2014. Section 343 of the Act places the responsibility on every company to deliver its annual return to the Registrar of Companies on time. Under the Act, the Registrar does not have any discretion in relation to the waiving of late filing penalties.
A company has the option of applying to the District Court for extra time to file their annual return. The Court may, if it is satisfied that it would be just to do so, make an Order extending the time in which the annual return may be delivered to the Registrar. Should the order be granted there would be no late filing penalties or, if applicable, no loss of audit exemption. Further information on this option is available in information leaflet no. 39 Extension of time to file an Annual Return on the Companies Registration Office (‘the CRO’) website https://www.cro.ie/Publications/Publications/Information-Leaflets.
A major upgrade of the CRO IT system went live with effect from 16th December 2020. This was a significant modernisation project which significantly increases the range of documents that can be filed electronically, with resulting efficiency gains for both business and the CRO. The new CRO cloud-based IT platform is designed to provide improved and faster user experience for presenters and a fully paperless interaction with the CRO for certain transactions, including all the most common ones carried out by companies such as the filing of annual returns. In addition, the new one-stage filing deadline of 56 days from a company's annual return date went live on 16th December 2020, over-hauling the previous two stage annual returns filing process.
