CIPC systems down and no smooth sailing in sight…

The website introduced new online transacting services, including a new company registration system, name reservation system, director and member change system and new systems for company and close corporation address and financial year-end changes.

The CIPC has been plagued by system problems for more than a year and its system was shut down during May last year following technical problems. At the time, the CIPC was installing additional servers and it had started work on an improved backup and archiving system. The changes were aimed at improving system performance and security.

Trade and Industry Minister Rob Davies conceded earlier that some progress had been made in improving service delivery but “much work” remained to be done.

The CIPC is responsible for the registration of companies and intellectual property, and is at the heart of the government’s attempts to accelerate the ease of doing business in SA.

The CIPC said in the past two weeks it had received close to 2,000 queries on the new system, for which tickets have been issued. The full turnaround time for these queries is 10 working days, but only 10% of the queries have been solved.

“The CIPC acknowledges that there appear to be problems with slow response times on director changes and company registration. To deal with this, the CIPC has effected a number of changes over the past two weeks, including increasing the bandwidth that it has and, most recently, increasing the storage and memory on its infrastructure,” the government agency said in a statement on Monday afternoon.

It was still implementing changes to its infrastructure during the afternoon and promised to “closely monitor” the effect on Tuesday.

It appears there have also been problems with the allocation of funds to customer accounts, which has hindered clients, and notably intermediaries, from performing transactions on the website. A system change was effected last week and the problem was corrected on Monday.

Internally, the CIPC has been struggling with the volumes of transactions in company registration, amendments to company memoranda of incorporation and director changes.

The CIPC said it was confident the problems would be resolved by the end of the week and that backlogs in critical areas, such as company registration and director changes, would be significantly reduced over the next two weeks.