CIPC Annual Report V1

Business rescue Table B. 4: Status of business rescue proceedings

2011 2012

2012 2013

2013 2014

2014 2015

2015 2016

2016 2017

2017 2018

2018 2019

2019 2020

2020 2021

Grand total

Status of proceedings Active

52 119 118 124 148 127 151 177 237 335 1588

Liquidation

58

64

70 21

73 26

73 24

49 17

32 22

19 33

17 15

5 3 1

460 300

Nullity

111 28

Set aside

2

5

6

4

2

2

5

2

29

Substantial Termination Grand total

83 107 105 97

86

71

56

44 71

46 56

11 17

706 874

77 117 89

89 150 109 99

383 440 409 413 481 375 362 349 373 372 3957

1.1.2

Compliance and enforcement

In this section, the compliance and enforcement activities are discussed. Annual returns As shown in Table B.5: Annual returns - in time filings, the “in time filings” increased by 85 398 filings (or 11%) compared with 2019/2020 financial year. The overall compliance rate also increased albeit only by 1%. Table B. 5: Annual returns filing CIPC services 2016/2017 2017/2018 2018/2019 2019/2020 2020/21 Annual returns filings 626 721 (48%) 663 442 (47%) 669 170 (44%) 680 120 (42%) 765 481 (46%) Annual Financial Statements (AFS)

With regard to AFS filings, the CIPC would on 1 July 2020, celebrate the second year anniversary of a stable, successful digital reporting mechanism, Inline eXtensible Business Reporting Language (iXBRL). An infographic with the statistical highlights was published on social media and a vignette was developed and circulated internally as part of change management interventions. As at the end September 2020, 28 232 AFS were filed since iXBRL roll out in 2018. The average total filings per quarter have been relatively stable at approximately 1 150 per quarter, with some quarters being marginally higher than previous quarters. Comparatively, the 2020/21 financial year has had higher filings per quarter than the previous financial year. This may be attributed to the change management interventions and gradual adoption and settling-in of the new reporting requirements. The software service provider community has been actively involved in quasi-marketing and advocacy of the iXBRL reporting requirements through their websites, events and other activities to presumably increase sales from their iXBRL software offerings. This has resulted in an increase in the number of filings. However, it also resulted in unintended consequences in the form of poor quality AFS and in some

cases value-less filings, i.e. filings by companies that are neither subject to an audit or independent review. The Corporate Disclosure and Compliance Unit continues to monitor data quality to mitigate the risk of valueless data flowing into the system. The Covid-19 pandemic may have impacted on the number of filings by hindering the sign-off of AFS by auditors due to limitations of audit engagements linked to the lockdown restrictions, especially for companies who have a financial year-end of 28 February and who would have had to approve their AFS by end August 2020. The validation service system prior to filing has been offline. This limited the timeliness of filings to some extent. However, the speed of resolving the Information Communication Technology (ICT) issues was on par to mitigate the risk. The GRAP taxonomy was finalised and adopted into the system to allow for State-Owned Companies that report in GRAP to file their AFS. This will increase the number of filings in the next financial year. The filings continue to be dominated mostly by companies whose AFS are audited; however, we are observing an increasing number filings where AFS were independently reviewed.

COMPANIES AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY COMMISSION I Annual Report 2020/21

24