Helen Saulnier 
Picture by Marissa Grootes on Unsplash
Choose your ordinary confined liability firm integrated in Ghana: the regular bare minimum of two administrators and at the very least one shareholder necessity has been achieved your auditor is in spot alongside with your ever-faithful Organization Secretary. You ensure you sign up your firm with the Registrar General’s Division, Ghana Income Authority, Ghana Financial investment Promotion Centre (if applicable) and acquire other licenses and permits from the applicable authorities. Ahead of you know it, you are previously fatigued from making an attempt to be compliant with all the specifications even in advance of you start off organization, allow by itself make your very first Ghana Cedi.
You at some point get all these performed, only to be told by your Enterprise Secretary that you need a amount of registers in purchase to be compliant with the Organizations Act 2019 (Act 992). You painfully appear at your Enterprise Secretary and question the dreaded query: “which registers”? Your Business Secretary smiles and starts listing the registers your certain corporation requirements. You are in a position to have a whole-blown daydream and again, with out the record ending and you painstakingly check out to recollect what your firm secretary shown:
- Register of Members (Segment 35 of Act 992)
- Register of Administrators and Corporation Secretary – (Segment 215 of Act 992)
- Sign up of debentures – (Part 99 of Act 992)
- Department Sign up – (Section 106 of Act 992)
- Sign-up of Holdings of Administrators – (Part 210 of Act 992)
- Passions Sign-up – (Portion 196 of Act 992) and
- Sign up of Particulars of Prices- (Part 115 of Act 992).
Your up coming question to your company secretary will likely be irrespective of whether all these registers are required? Fortunately, the respond to is no. While there is a obligatory requirement to hold some registers, other individuals can be dispensed with. For occasion, Portion 196(6) of Act 992 permits a firm to dispense with the need to have for an Pursuits Register by passing an normal resolution by the customers at a general meeting. On the other hand, there are some registers that are compulsory, this kind of as the Sign-up of Users and the Sign-up of Administrators and Organization Secretary. Understandably, if a enterprise has no debentureholders, there will not be a have to have to have a debenture sign up and in the absence of any fees getting developed, there will be no have to have for a sign-up of particulars of expenses.
There are penalties to be confronted by providers which are unsuccessful to continue to keep the registers which are mandatorily essential to be kept. For case in point, in regard of Sign up of Associates, area 35(15) of Act 992 delivers that where by a business defaults in complying, the business and every single officer of the company that is in default is liable to spend to the Registrar of Providers, an administrative penalty of 25 penalty units for each and every working day throughout which the default carries on. At the moment, a penalty unit is equal to GHS12.
In excess of the decades a number of firms in Ghana have proven a lifestyle of small compliance when it arrives to fulfilling the necessary needs less than the Businesses Act, in particular when it arrives to retaining registers. It is thus really stunning that the relatively new Act 992 destinations even further requirements on firms to maintain a number of registers.
