The ministry of corporate affairs’ recent move to start processing corporate filings at Central Processing Centre (CPC) has business executives worried. The e-filing facility for the 12 forms, which are going to be processed at CPC now, existed even before but the processing was done at the local RoC (registrar of companies) level. The new mechanism doesn’t allow this, casing hardship to firms.

Earlier, regional offices of RoC would act as interface and give approval to these corporate filings. With the current centralisation, the RoC will be freed of this task, and the corporates will likely face higher bureaucratic issues.

“Earlier, the filing issues could be resolved at the regional RoC offices. CPC may lead to higher efficiency but considering the experience with CRC and C-PACE, the resolution of matters could take longer than usual. Though there are helplines to assist with filings, the time taken to resolve a problem is usually high with centralisation,” explained Ankit Singhi, head (corporate affairs & compliances) at Corporate Professionals.

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CRC (Central Registration Centre) and C-PACE (Centralised Processing for Accelerated Corporate Exit are existing systems for filing forms for incorporation and closure of companies, respectively. Prior to CPC, corporates and professionals were facing delays due to technical issues with version 3 of the MCA portal (launched in January 2023).

A corporate executive said that the chances of resolving a filing issue at CPC would likely take days or weeks as against hours at the moment.

To begin with, MCA is processing 12 forms at CPC such as declaration of solvency, change in name, conversion of private company into public entity, alteration in capital, obtaining the status of dormant company, etc. By April, it will process more forms through this faceless system. MCA expects to handle about 2.5 lakh forms annually once the system is fully operational.

The idea of CPC is to increasingly use the RoC workforce for investigation, enforcement and adjudication. In case of a big corporate fraud, the preliminary investigation begins at RoC before moving onto higher levels such as MCA regional directors and SFIO (Serious Fraud Investigation Office).