Monday, September 18, 2006

Get! Set!! Go!!!- Indian Government becoming trendy!!

nnaThe Indian legislation, for long has been both weak and very complicated for compliance. Parochialism has infected the Indian system and the bureaucrats should think out-of-the-box to improve its status. It would take years to cleanse the entire system and the government should put forth new ideas that would make the legislation more tangible and easily compliable. The Ministry of Company Affairs has brought one such law into the picture. The law has made the filing of companies’ annual reports and the balance sheets of profit and loss accounts mandatory. The innovative part of it is that everything can be done online instead of the traditional paper work.

It’s essential for the government’s well being to monitor the companies’ progress/regress, which makes the filings of reports all the more important. In the past this law would have added to the problems of a company’s director because these filings would involve lot of paper work like adjusting the balance sheet, managing the audit report et al. Now it has become all easier with this novel way of doing it online.

The government has sought the help of various private companies like Tata Consultancy Services, IDRBT Certifying Authority, SafeScrypt CA Services, Sify Communications Ltd etcetera for certifying the filings, since the inclusion of Director Identity Number (DIN) is mandatory. Inclusion of private parties only assures quality and one can also hope that the entire process will speed up considerably.

This law of the government has implications on
1) The country’s legislative setup and
2) The companies’ readiness to make its account transparent

As aforesaid the Indian legislation is as cumbersome and inefficient as one would imagine and it needs many innovations. This e-filing mandatory law might just feed in some fuel and kick-start that process. It also means that the government has become pro- active and is ready to adopt new ideas for making its legislation more transparent and easily approachable.

Monitoring a company’s activities is very important from many angles. It helps the government to track its progress/regress and make sure that the organization is abiding the law and compliant to the government policies. An optimist would expect an organization to make its account transparent willingly and only the tedious paper work hinders it from doing so. Now the process has been made very easy with this advent and we can say nothing prevents the optimist from realizing his expectations.

Transparency in all fields is the need for the hour and it is under the jurisdiction of the country to check the activities of the corporate organizations. Law abiding and rule compliant corporate augurs well for the country’s growth. I would call this a bold and important step in the process of modernization of the legislation and in my court the lawmakers deserve a pat for their endeavor.

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