It has been over eight months since the e-filing system of Ministry of Corporate Affairs-MCA21 has been sputtering. Neither the MCA nor Infosys, which took over the site from TCS, is willing to resolve the issues
Eight months after Tata Consultancy Services handed over the MCA21, the e-filing portal of Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) to Infosys, its continues to malfunction. Moneylife has been highlighting the issue since January, but despite promises from top brasses of MCA and Infosys (the company that looks after the portal), there is no improvement, complain Chartered Accountants (CAs) and Company Secretaries (CS) who use the portal regularly.
Readers would recall that this information and e-filing website mysteriously went for a toss on 17 January 2013, the very day that Infosys, India's most celebrated information technology company, took over its maintenance from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). Since then, people accessing MCA21 for paid information or mandatory filing have been facing a nightmare.
Company Secretaries and CAs whose professional services require a MCA21 to function smoothly at all times have been desperately appealing for help and have so far refrained from confronting the ministry openly. However, now fed up with a callous ministry and Infosys, some of them have now come out in the open. A group of CS, CAs, CWAs, lawyers, companies and consultants have now started an open petition on Change.org to highlight the issues they are facing everyday due to malfunction of MCA21 portal. Here is the link to the petition:
Binoy Chacko of BG & Associates said, “The difficulties created by MCA21 results in delays in company and LLP registrations and corporate compliance filings. This is resulting in huge penalty, duplicate fee payments, and waste of professional man-hours across country, delay of application or approval process at Registrar of Companies-ROC and MCA offices. Corporate compliance and governance system have come to a halt.”
Bangalore Company Secretaries Association (BCSA) discussed the difficulties they faced from 17 January 2013 with Infosys and MCA officials during a meeting held on 4 May 2013 in the city. After this, Mr Chacko wrote a letter to CN Raghupathi, head of the India business unit at Infosys. In the letter he requested him to take steps to solve issues by evaluating the present problems faced by professionals. He stated, “You have assured all the technical problems in MCA 21 project will be cleared in a month’s time. But now after four months later, the accessibility becomes almost impossible. We are not able to file any forms with MCA for last few days. With great difficulty we file very few documents at odd hours. We need to know whether Infosys is going to get this rectified on urgent basis. We are fast approaching the peak filing season of year 2013. We are really worried that the annual filing in 2013 will be real mess unless you take necessary corrective actions immediately. We are facing one or other problem with MCA after Infosys took the MCA 21 project Management from TCS.”
However, Raghupathi replied that, they are not getting any complaints from others and it may be personal infrastructural errors. “System is functioning well and all transactions are maintained by the ministry and reviewed weekly,” the Infosys official said.
The stakeholders of MCA21 are petitioning Sachin Pilot, the Minister, MCA, to address the difficulties and ensure smooth functioning of MCA 21 for a better Compliance and Governance system. The petition now have received about 1000 signatures from professionals and corporate across country
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