By the rule
by Emeterio Sd. Perez
IT seems the stockholders and management of many companies registered with the Securities and Exchange Commission are either ignorant of the law, or have never bothered to know their obligations after obtaining SEC certificates for their businesses.
Last year, the SEC revoked the registration of 286,285-or 46.467 percent-of the 616,102 companies registered with the commission as of end-2005. These were the erring corporations that have failed to file the required reports as stock and nonstock corporations.
Perhaps, to these companies, the SEC certificates they display in their offices and submit to banks to guarantee their legal personality are all they need to go into business.
The SEC statistics, however, tells something worse than noncompliance with the law-the close to 300,000 non-complying companies have been doing business illegally.
The corporate regulator classifies these companies as "inactive" along with those whose certificates have been cancelled, which number 505; dissolved corporations, 15,244; and those with expired certificates, 15,404.
(Only the certificates of 2,427 companies have been reactivated after their petitions for reinstatement have been approved by the SEC.)
Registration update. Having cleansed its registry of noncomplying companies, the SEC has on file 298,689 active companies.
Of the total, 154,963 are stock corporations; 75,178 nonstock corporations; and 68,548 partnerships.
Of the different types of companies, only partnerships are not required to submit annual or periodic reports.
This means that nonstock or non-government organizations should not hide the sources of their funding-they are also covered by the reportorial requirements. Unluckily for them, by obeying the law, officers of these nonstock or nongovernment organizations might be exposing the huge fees they receive, if any.
Beware of revocation. Revoking after proper warning may be the only way to instill discipline on erring corporations, particularly the family-owned or controlled corporations whose shares are not listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange.
The law may be too strict, but there is nothing more SEC officials could do to effectively send their message across.
The SEC resorted to what it termed as mass revocation-it recalled the certificates of 262,742 companies on April 22, 2003, and those of another 678 thereafter.
SEC earnings. The private sector may not know that by registering their companies, they make big contribution to the government coffers.
In 2004, The SEC earned from them P936,913,011.70, an increase of 34.641 percent from the previous year's P695,865,422.76. Corporate registration generated P742,449,191.24, or 79.2 percent of the total amount.
Without these funds, the SEC would have functioned on a deficit in 2004-it grossed only P194,463,820.46 from other sources (license fees, P60,459,068.52; fines and penalties, P96,040,469.76; and miscellaneous income, P37,964,282.18) against expenditures of P368 million.
http://www.businessmirror.com.ph/2006/0214/14%20cos%20sec.php
No comments:
Post a Comment