Par Panel asks MCA to hike company fees; increase manpower

The Corporate Affairs Ministry has been asked by a Parliamentary panel to step up its hiring of professional staff for agencies like SFIO and CCI, as also the Registrars of Companies (RoCs), and to increase various fees levied on registered companies to mop up resources.

The Parliament's Standing Committee on Finance has also asked the Ministry to be make more realistic projection of funds at the Budgetary Estimate level to avoid any under- utilisation of funds at the end of the year.

The panel has made these observations in its report on the Demand of Grants made by the Corporate Affairs Ministry for the current fiscal, 2013-14, wherein it has also suggested new measures for spreading investor awareness including through mediums like SMSes, Internet, radio and television.

The Parliamentary committee, chaired by senior BJP leader Yashwant Sinha, observed that it has been more than a decade since the Ministry revised the fees paid to the RoC by the companies for their registration.

The panel opined that the ministry should increase the registration fees for companies depending on their size, turnover etc, while it can also start levying annual renewal fees and increase the user charges for various services availed from the RoC. "Such self-generation of resources will enable the Ministry to contribute to the Consolidated Fund of India" while levying of these charges would also induce non-serious companies to either comply or deregister themselves and thereby reduce the workload on the field offices, it said.

The panel also observed that the existing corporate law administrative set-up at the ministry is already handling huge workload and on date there are about 13 lakh registered firms.

In the last year itself, about two crore filings took place through MCA's electronic filing platform MCA21, while the ministry had over 49,000 prosecution cases pending as on December 31, 2012.

The new Companies Bill would put further pressure on the existing infrastructure and manpower requirements."The Committee observes that the shortage of skilled manpower is seriously affecting the functioning of the Ministry in general and its field offices in particular."The Committee finds that inspite of being in such a tight spot, the Ministry has been reluctant to hire/engage skilled workforce on contractual terms on the plea that it would create conflict of interest and undermine professional ethics."The Ministry instead seeks to fill up its regular vacancies and is pursuing UPSC and SSC in this regard," panel said, while urging the ministry to "come out of its slumber and take immediate action to address this serious shortage of skilled manpower."