Papua New Guinea Investment Promotion Authority (IPA) expects the number of companies listed in its system to drop, due to its cleansing exercise, an official says.
Managing director Clarence Hoot said those companies that did not comply during the 12-month grace period which would end on Dec 1 would be automatically deregistered.
“Right now, the number of companies operating is 63,000 from the old system, but in the new system I expect it to be around 30,000 to 40,000,” he said.
“Through this cleansing and re-registration exercise, the number would come down because of non-compliance.
“This database will be the most updated database for all business entities in the country.”
Hoot said the information would be shared with the Internal Revenue Commission (IRC) for it to undertake a reconciliation exercise with regards to the companies’ tax identification numbers (TIN), to determine which companies were compliant and which were not.
“It gives the Government the right information in perusing those who are not-compliant, and get them to get into the basket and pay some or outstanding taxes.”
Hoot said the re-registration process was important for companies as it would enable them to update and file annual returns and manage their own records in the future.
“The IPA aims to have a clean and updated registry of business entity records and currently it is impossible to ascertain which companies are operating or which are not,” he said.
“Over 90 per cent of companies are non-compliant with IPA.
Thank “As such, IPA has made compliance simpler and cheaper for companies which have outstanding annual returns through the re-registration process.”