South African business owners have shared their frustrations of not being able to register their businesses online, as the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) continues to experience systems challenges on its Web site.
Disgruntled local entrepreneurs have taken to Twitter to express their disappointment with the agency of the Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, after they failed to use its e-services as a result of tech glitches experienced on its site.
This after the CIPC announced plans to upgrade its e-services and BizPortal platforms this week – as part of a migration process aimed at providing a paperless, faster company registration and maintenance system for users.
CIPC is the registrar and regulator of companies, co-operatives and intellectual property rights responsible for company registrations and the monitoring of domestic business entities compliance with company and intellectual property law, among other roles.
In a statement released yesterday evening, the CIPC explained that, while all rigorous testing and re-testing was conducted, it is expected that with projects of this magnitude, there would be “teething problems” experienced.
“The CIPC wishes to extend an apology to affected customers for the inconvenience caused to them. It is unfortunate that the biggest issue experienced was out of the CIPC’s control. The Department of Home Affairs experienced systems issues, which the CIPC relies on for verification, earlier today. This resulted in some customers not being able to submit new applications and/or received error messages for OTP verification,” said the agency.
According to the CIPC, the relevant back office staff is attending to the delays caused by this, noting there may be isolated issues the organisation may not be aware of, and urged customers to log faults on the Query Resolution System, in order for the issues to be speedily resolved.
Established in November 2019, the Biz Portal was developed byCIPC in response to the quest of improving the ease of doing business in SA, specifically, starting a business.
Through the platform, entrepreneurs are able to register a business within a day, which, according to government, is a dramatic improvement on turnaround times of 40 days recorded by the World Bank 2020 Ease of Doing Business Report.
Other collaborative partners include SARS, the Unemployment Insurance Fund and the Compensation Fund, and CIPC, which have made it possible for applicants of private firms to obtain key business services, such as company registration, tax registration number, domain name registration, B-BBEE certificate, compensation fund registration, unemployment insurance fund registration, as well as a business bank account.
Tweeps have been blaming the CIPC, for going live with the upgraded system, without first trialling it among a closed group of users.
@Ndlovunovich wrote:”Take some responsibility; you unveiled a system that was untested. So instead of you properly testing it, it is left to the user to test your badly designed system?”
@Javaman1fss shared images of the loudly crying face emojis followed by: “This started last week Friday!!”
@Mthobisi_Maduna vented: ”It was wrong to cut off the old system before ensuring that the new one runs smoothly.”
Another Tweep, named @Shishinya1 wrote: “Website incomplete....certain sections still showing DEFAULT TEXT!!
In a Twitter status update shared at 11am today, CIPC wrote:
Dear Customers, CIPC is aware of challenges regarding the following functions:
1. Name reservations and approvals.
2. Company registrations.
3. Amending of directors
4. Lodging of Annual Returns Our ICT team is working on resolving the issue.
CIPC had not responded to ITWeb’s emailed questions on the matter by publishing time of this story.
Yesterday the company had informed Twitter users of new URL changes for logins to some services.
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