MCA Provides Guidance for ROC Filing

ROC Filing Guidelines

Annual ROC Filing Guidelines:

Companies that have been incorporated under the Companies Act, 1956, have to file the following documents in order to fulfill the annual ROC Filing with the Registrar of Companies (ROC). The Ministry of Corporate Affairs (MCA) have recently, provided with new ROC Filing Guidelines in order to ease the filing process for the companies. The documents to be submitted by all the companies as per the new ROC Filing Guidelines are as follows-

  • Annual Return in Form 20B to be filed by any company having share capital.
  • Annual Return in Form 21A to be filed by the companies that do not have share capital.
  • Balance Sheet in Form 23AC.
  • Profit and Loss Account in Form 23ACA.
  • Compliance Certificate in Form 66 by companies that have a paid up capital of Rs.10 Lakh to Rs.5 Crore.

Important Points to Remember in the ROC Filing Guidelines:

The Roc Filing Guidelines also provide with certain points that must be remembered or kept in mind by the companies while filing the ROC Compliance. These are as follows-

  1. All the e-forms and the relevant documents attached with them must be less than 2.5 MB.
  2. The Profit and Loss Accounts and the Balance Sheets must be filed in two separate forms as mentioned above.
  3. The Annual Returns, Balance Sheets and the Profit and Loss Accounts are to be attached to the relevant forms filed by the company. The person filing the ROC is advised to convert the attachments into a text file or excel sheets using a software of PDF Convertor and upload the attachments in PDF Format. This is done because a scanned copy version of the attachments can increase the size of the document and is expensive too. To ease the filing process as per the new ROC Filing Guidelines, the MCA also provides a PDF Conversion facility on its online portal for users.
  4. The companies filing the ROC must verify the true and correctness of the database of the MCA regarding the Paid-up capital and the Authorized Capital. The ROC Filing Guidelines state that all the companies in case of any discrepancy, must apply for the correction in Master Data. Along with this the companies are required to declare their actual and correct authorized capital and paid up capital in the annually filed forms.
  5. If a company does not file the ROC on time or at regular intervals then they are levied with the penalty for late annual filing or non-filing of ROC return.

E-Filing as per the new ROC Filing Guidelines:

As per the new ROC Filing Guidelines provided by the MCA, Companies can do e-Filing in three different ways as mentioned below-

  1. The e-forms can be uploaded on the website of the MCA in the Annual Filing Corner Link, by the representative of the company. For filing the forms one must register themselves as a user on the portal. Once registered, a person or company can file the forms as per their convenience.
  2. As per the ROC Filing Guidelines, the representative of the company has to prepare the e-forms. They have to get these forms digitally signed by an authorized signatory, copy the forms in a pendrive or CD and then visit the nearest Registrar’s Front Office (RFO) for further assistance. The RFO staff helps the representative and assist them in uploading the relevant forms on the portal.
  3. The representative of the company can also fget assistance by contacting any Certified Filing Centers (CFCs) for filing the annual returns and forms. For this they have to pay nominal service charges.
Author: Anil Agrawal
EZYBIZ India Consulting LLP, New Delhi. The firm is business and tax consultancy firm providing consultancy in Taxation, Regulatory, Transfer pricing, Valuation, Corporate funding and Business set up matters. He may be reached at 9899217778 or anil@ezybizindia.in.