Late Filing of Annual Company Returns – ingenious method for detecting recalcitrant companies

DUBLIN - Nov. 13, 2017 - PRLog -- Late Filing of Annual Returns– State using a simple, but ingenious method for detecting recalcitrant companies in Ireland

In early November 2017, in District Court Number 8 in the Four Courts, Dublin, Judge Brennan presided over more than twenty cases of companies which were either late or had failed to file Annual Returns and Accounts with the Companies Registration Office in Ireland.

Prosecution notices had been issued on the 9th October to companies from different parts of Ireland which, it appears, had been selected on the basis of a consistently poor filing history.

The Irish Companies Registration Office (CRO) has a simple, but ingenious, method for detecting these companies. They simply rank companies by the amount of late filing fees paid on their Annual Returns over a period of time and then draw up a league table.

Those at the top of this league table have obviously been the most late and the most often and are practically self-selecting for prosecution. (Had they not filed at all, they would have simply been struck off.)

While the majority of companies in Judge Brennan's court No. 8 received fines in the order of €1,300 to €1,500. Those that had failed to engage legal representation and/or had not filed the outstanding annual returns before the court date received the highest possible Category 4, Class A fine which was a very painful €5,000.

Séan Kavanagh, managing director of Company Formations International Ltd (CFI), one of Ireland's leading and longest established company formation and company secretarial specialists pointed out that "When this is combined with the late filing fees already paid to CRO, legal costs, AND the loss of Audit Exemption it all adds up to a very expensive omission on the part of the prosecuted companies."

Mr Kavanagh also went on to state that "Companies for which CFI arranged legal representation, with a lot of preliminary work done, received fines between €500 (with six months to pay) and €1,200 (with eight months to pay)."

His understanding is that CRO are contemplating a further round of prosecutions for this month, with summons being issued in the near future.

For further details on this topic, Séan Kavanagh directs readers to visit  http://www.formations.ie/static/CourtFactSheetNov2017.pdf on the CFI website to see a very useful Factsheet produced by Sue Jesper, Company Secretarial Supervisor of CFI.