Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) is an independent statutory body established to regulate and monitor the activities of companies registered in Nigeria to ensure that these companies function as responsible institutions and operate based on legal and ethical principles.
CAC has passed the basic efficiency and transparency test in best practice environments. In fact, a new Executive Order 001 (EO1) compliance report by the Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) identified CAC as being among the five top-performing MDAs that promoted transparency and efficiency in Nigeria’s business environment for 2022.
A source in the presidency on ease of doing business, said the top-performing MDAs differentiate themselves by achieving a balanced performance on both the efficiency and transparency scales, across the three cross-cutting directives of transparency, default approval and one government.
Efficiency measures an MDA’s compliance with service delivery timelines, as well as compliance with the default approval and one government directives of the EO1, while transparency is measured based on the existence of an updated website, interactive online service portal, detailed timelines, costs, statutory requirements and customer service contact details.
Let us give you an insight into what the Corporate Affairs Commission is, its functions, who will be subject to them, how the CAC can enforce them and how your business should take advantage of the opportunities that come with operating within the country’s capital market.
Corporate Affairs Commission is an independent statutory body established to regulate and monitor the activities of companies registered in Nigeria to ensure that these companies function as responsible institutions and operate based on legal and ethical principles.
It was created by a statute of the National Assembly passed in 1991. The commission is directly accountable to the President through the Minister of State for Planning. The Corporate Affairs Commission has a broad range of functions
The Chairman, the head of CAC, is Hon. Ademola Seriki. The chairman of CAC has a wide range of responsibilities in overseeing the activities of companies registered in Nigeria. The chairman is responsible for regulating and monitoring the activities of companies within and outside Nigeria that are registered and those that still need to be registered with the commission. In addition, the commission also has specific powers over companies that do not comply with its regulations, including powers to order their suspension or cancellation.
The functions of the organisation under the leadership of its MD, Garba Abubakar, as set out in section 7 of the Companies and Allied Matters Act, is not limited to the regulation and supervision of the formation, incorporation, management and winding up of companies. As Nigeria’s government continues to face the challenge of making the country more business-friendly across all sectors, the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) has eased this by registering Business Names, and Incorporated Trustees as well as providing a wide range of ancillary services. This has eased doing business in the country.
The organisation has over the years been committed to continuous improvement in its processes and procedures.
Recently, the commission’s Customer Relationship Management in line with global best practices was active for customers to leverage and resolve challenges in record time.
However, CAC’s servers are one of the major barriers to registering a company in Africa’s largest economy.
There is pressure no doubt on its servers and the organisation has tried to remediate these pressures when they began to come up. They weren’t designed to take as many registrations as we are getting. They were primarily designed to incorporate businesses. Investments in more servers would have helped.
SERVICOM, the federal agency responsible for promoting effective and efficient service delivery in ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) recently touted the CAC’s service delivery index as being within acceptable limits and so far, the highest among government agencies in the country.
Olamide Adeniji is a member of the editorial team of TheScript Newspaper
