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Business News/ Companies / The MCA21 glitches
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The MCA21 glitches

A frequent user explains what's wrong

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The ‘back’ button

Once you’ve made the payment, documents for all years for a given category (there are seven categories) are available on one page. However, the ‘back’ button doesn’t work, so once you’re done with one category, you go all the way out to your dashboard and start again.

Misclassification

Several documents are often being misclassified. For example, a form documenting the appointment or removal of a director shows up in a category called “Documents Related to Conversion of Company in LLP" instead of the category specifically for “Changes in Directors". What this means is that someone could easily miss a new filing and assume that nothing relevant was filed by the company recently, etc.

Downloads

Some documents are currently impossible to download because of a glitch. An example of these are the certificates recently issued by MCA pertaining to the creation of a mortgage. The system does not let you download them until you click a button that purportedly verifies the digital signature on a form. However, if you click this button, the process fails and you cannot download the certificate. These certificates are often required when a company applies for a loan to a bank and the bank checks out existing charges on the company’s assets.

Invoices

On invoices, once you’ve made a payment for X number of companies, very often the companies don’t show up in your download workspace. If that happens, you have no way to track which companies you actually paid for—no record whatsoever. How do I even raise a complaint now? Similarly, when a chartered accountant (CA)/company secretary (CS) downloads documents about a company on behalf of a bank, etc, the bank will often ask for proof that the documents were obtained legitimately (and hence will ask for a payment receipt). Now in this case, the CA/CS will have nothing if he/she paid for multiple companies on the same invoice.

Challans

The challan system seems to be particularly broken, actually. A company secretary confirmed that what happens quite a lot is that they pay the fee for company incorporation but the challan does not get generated. This stalls the process of filing because the challan number is required to be filled into the incorporation application form. So without the challan, you’re stuck. The challan does appear eventually. But its nerve-racking and irritating. This and other reasons have brought down the rate of company incorporation from 350+ a day to almost fewer than 100. (500 companies were incorporated on the day just before the MCA system was taken down for a re-launch)

Registrar of companies

Another thing that is broken is the company-RoC mapping apparently. They had/have a search feature where you can search for a company by its registration number and RoC (say company registration number 57,600 of the RoC of Delhi). This feature is now broken, which means that in several cases, even if the company exists, the system simply says that the company was not found. If you look for the same company in a different way (by name, for instance), it is very much there.

Customer service

The system is broken in a myriad subtle ways. And it is proving impossible to reason with the Infosys team (even when the tech team calls in response to a ticket). And the folks at the end of the MCA Corporate Seva Kendra line are absolutely clueless (that has always been the case. Their only solution ever is to say—“clear your cookies, reboot your system and use only Internet Explorer").

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Published: 27 Apr 2016, 09:53 PM IST
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