The decision to take a collective action was taken following a meeting between the department of company affairs (DCA) and SEBI top brass on Friday.

The task forces will comprise the Registrar of Companies (RoC) of the city, the stock-exchange executive director and the regional SEBI official. These task forces would carry out detailed investigation, which will also include on-site visits, into companies which are believed to have vanished after raising funds from the market.

The core group will comprise DCA secretary T Krishnamurthy, SEBI executive director (legal) Dharmishta Raval and senior SEBI executive director (primary markets) OP Gahrotra and some senior DCA officials.

This group will supervise the progress made by the task forces.The securities regulator would through the regional stock exchanges furnish details of companies guilty of having vanished. The RoC, which is the legal entity responsible for taking action against such firms, would take legal action against such promoters.

The task forces will be set up in Mumbai, New Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Ahmedabad, Calcutta and Bangalore.

The decision to go in for a coordinated crackdown comes in the wake of little headway being made in the exercise even five months after the prime minister announced that he would ensure that action would be taken against such companies within three months.

The SEBI chairman had on Wednesday directed stock exchanges to pull up their socks in tracing "vanishing" companies. Mehta told chiefs of exchanges to set up special "cells" to track down such firms.

SEBI has maintained that it is not legally responsible for monitoring the end-use of public issue proceeds and, hence, can only help the DCA by using the listing agreement route to identify suchcompanies.

The trouble, however, is that both DCA and SEBI have been lobbing the ball in each other's court. Late last year, finance secretary Vijay Kelkar had held a meeting with the SEBI and DCA top brass where it was decided that while SEBI would provide information to DCA, the latter would take the necessary action.

The formula adopted by SEBI is that if a company has not been furnishing its annual reports consistently or is not paying its listing fees and its share price has hit rock bottom, it can be deemed to have vanished.

This activity, however, has to be carried out by the regional stock exchanges. These in turn would have to share their findings with the RoC and work together with them in cracking down on errant companies. This is what has been sought to be achieved through Friday's decision.