CRO CHRISTMAS DEADLINES
December is often a frantic month as everyone juggles Christmas presents and clearing their office desks.
KomSec cannot help with the Christmas presents but, we can help you clear any outstanding filing requirements you may have before Christmas. Just remember, the CRO will not guarantee processing any submissions received after the following dates.
– Company Incorporations 11th December
– Change of Name 11th December
– Reservation of Company Name 19th December
Trustees’ Week: 13-17 November 2017
What is Trustees’ Week?
This week is Ireland’s first Trustees’ Week and is a nationwide campaign organised by the Charities Regulatory Authority and other partner organisations to celebrate the essential role that Trustees’ in Ireland play for the not-for-profit sector and to highlight the opportunities for all of us to make a difference and get involved.
#TrusteesWeekIrl
The week will be supported by the organisations on the steering committee posting on social media using the hashtag and publishing a series of blogs about trustees, you can access these on the Trustees’ Week LinkedIn page here.
Events
Please click on the hyperlink CRA Trustees’ Week Events for a list of events being held in Dublin and Limerick. In addition, the Charities Regulator will host public meetings in Limerick (November 13) and Dublin (November 15).
E-Learning Module for Trustees
The centrepiece of these will be to showcase the new e-learning module for trustees (which will be hosted on www.charitiesregulator.ie, the Charities Regulator website). There will be case studies from a number of charity trustees and a short presentation by Boardmatch Ireland on how to become a charity trustee.
Climate change can now been seen in the Companies Registration Office (CRO) as, following a drought in prosecutions for a number of years, it has re-started prosecuting companies for late filing of Annual Returns.
The CRO suspended prosecutions following the introduction of the Companies Act. Now that companies and practitioners have had an opportunity to become familiar with the Act the CRO have now re-started a prosecutorial regime.
Currently, there are over 214,000 companies on the Register. Compliance with Annual Return filing deadlines for the past number of years has consistently hit over 80% per year leaving a potential pool of 42,800 companies that might fall into the category of late filing.
Obviously, a number of variables apply but, that said, just over 20 companies have been prosecuted by the CRO. These companies will have to appear before the Courts in November, and without over relying on weather related puns it is fair to describe this level of prosecution as a trickle.
Upon conviction the Courts can apply a Class A Fine (€5,000) per offence. It will be interesting to see how the Courts deal with the prosecutions in November as historically outcomes could best be described as patchy. Will the trickle become a flood? Only time will tell but, I would not be putting out the sandbags just yet!
With so much publicity on GDPR it can be hard to separate the wood from the trees, and zero in on what is actually relevant.
Planning out a structured response should help the bulk of small firms find life under GDPR not quite as daunting as it may first appear.
As a starting point small firms should consider the following three points.
– What personal data does your firm retain
– Why is the personal data retained
– What does your firm do with the personal data
Ensuring your firm can document answers to the above will go a substantial way towards demonstrating compliance with GDPR.
Reviewing your firms’ position on “Privacy Notices” and “Giving Consent” should be your next port of call. Privacy Notices deal with the lawful basis for processing personal data, the length of time such data will be held, etc. Giving Consent is required to clearly show that consent to use of personal data for specific reasons was freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous.
Companies (small firms in particular) have finite resources so, plan out what resources your firm can put into GDPR, who will be responsible for overseeing implementation, and timelines for completing the above first steps.
The deadline date for complying with GDPR is May 2018 but, for small firms to best manage resources starting now so that the work programme can be spread over months is practical.
