The Hindu Business Line : Portal glitch puts companies in a quandary

Chennai, Oct. 29 A snag in the system for e-filing of company documents with the Registrar of Companies (ROC) has put thousands of companies into difficulty, as they race to meet the October 30 deadline.

Even as Tata Consultancy Services, the company that maintains the portal, has been trying to fix the glitch, the Institute of Company Secretaries of India has appealed to the Ministry of Company Affairs to extend the deadline.

The snag, which has been there for nearly 10 days, was probably caused by the rush of companies using the ROC portal. Mr P.D. Sudhakar, Additional Secretary (Corporate Affairs), Ministry of Company Affairs, told Business Line today that in October over 1,73,000 companies filed their documents, as against about 53,000 in the same month last year.

e-filing mandatory

“Last year, e-filing was optional and manual filing was also accepted. But this year, all companies have to mandatorily file their documents online,” says Mr S. Srinivasan, Senior Partner, S. Srinivasan & Co, a Company Secretaries’ firm in Chennai. “The payment gateway did not open even today,” he said. Attributing the glitch to the last-hour rush, Mr Srinivasan says it is only a temporary issue and should be fixed anytime as “MCA 21 (the e-filing project) is one of the best portals after that of the Railways”.

According to other sources, the portal often does not accept uploading of documents, saying “Transaction error. Please try uploading later”.

While many companies complained that the problem continued to exist, a spokesperson of TCS said that the Web site www.mca.gov.in has experienced some technical problems primarily during the third week of this month, which resulted in lesser number of returns being processed.

However, “these problems have been fixed and the system has been processing record volumes since October 25,” the spokesperson said.

Asked how TCS would ensure that the problem would not recur, the spokesperson said, “We believe this was a peculiar problem mainly associated with large sized annual return forms and balance sheets and the system needed changes to take care of this. Being a public filing system, we are studying the filing patterns to see what further improvements are needed for the future.”

Meanwhile, the Institute of Company Secretaries of India has also approached the Ministry of Company Affairs for extension of last date for e-filing.

“We have been in constant touch with the Registrar of Companies and TCS on this issue, and have sought to extend the last date by a month,” Mr Keyoor M. Bakshi, President of the Institute, told Business Line today.

More Stories on : Corporate | E-Governance | Internet

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication :: Printer Friendly Page