Confident that the new upgraded company filing portal has now stabilised, the ministry of corporate affairs (MCA) has asked LTI Mindtree to improve the user friendliness of the website. It also plans to move another 51 corporate forms and other facilities on the portal in the coming months.

“Much of the upgraded V3 portal has now stabilised. Over 95% of the problems regarding digital signature certificate (DSC) has been resolved and work is on with the ICAI and ICSI to merge multiple user IDs, which was another problem,” senior government officials noted, adding that the number of new registrations on the portal as well as filing of forms has seen a huge increase. The certificate of incorporation, which was facing delays, is now also happening in real time, they said.

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The MCA is, however, working with LTI Mindtree to resolve a few remaining issues on the portal as well as to improve the user friendliness. For instance, in case of an error or mismatch in a form, the portal should highlight it so that the user knows exactly what has to be corrected. This is one such issue that will be taken up to improve the accessibility of the portal, officials explained.

While the focus at present is to further stabilise the portal, the MCA also plans to migrate 51 new forms and linked forms as well we compliance management and e-adjudication modules to the website.

As a move towards more accountability and transparency, the MCA is considering a plan to introduce Aadhaar-based authentication for sign-ups on to the portal as another step for KYC. “This will ensure that each account is separate and belongs to a single individual,” noted one of the officials.

The upgraded portal already requires professionals, directors and key management personnel of companies to register as business users with either their PAN, professional registration number or Director Identification Number (DIN). The objective, according to officials, was that there are not multiple user IDs and emails for a single director or KMP.

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Over 0.65 million new users have registered as business users on theV3 portal of which 0.3 million are directors registered as business users. Another 0.35 million DSCs have been registered on the portal. About 21,000 companies have also been incorporated after January 31 with a record 1,192 filings for incorporation made on a single day on April 10.

The Version 3 or V3 website of the MCA21 portal is an upgraded version with better services such as web-based forms as well as the use of data analytics. The MCA had migrated nine company forms on the portal on August 31, 2022, and second set of 56 company forms, including 10 incorporation-related forms, were shifted on January 23 this year. However, users had complained of a number of technical difficulties in logging on to the portal and filling forms, which had impacted their compliance procedures. Union finance and corporate affairs minister Nirmala Sitharaman had then asked the ministry to form a special team to address public grievances on priority and monitor the problems on a daily basis.