Cape Town — The Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office's (Cipro's) credibility has been questioned by its own chairman.

This follows auditor-general Shauket Fakie being embarrassed in Parliament for using outdated information to ascertain levels of compliance on the declaration of financial interests by ministers and civil servants.

Cipro chairman Rob Angel expressed concern about the sub-standard performance in the body's 2004-05 annual report tabled in Parliament yesterday.

Cipro, a trade and industry department institution, is responsible for the registration of companies, close corporations and their directors. It also handles the registration of trade marks, patents, copyright and designs.

The accuracy of Cipro information came under the national spotlight over the past week with the release of Fakie's damning report on the declaration of financial interests by cabinet ministers, deputy ministers and senior civil servants.

Cabinet considered Fakie's report at its meeting last week and expressed concern that, although most cabinet ministers had resigned as directors or members of those companies, the Cipro database did not reflect the latest information.

In the report, Angel noted that Cipro had been criticised for its "unbearable" turnaround times in processing applications, for losing documents and for various mistaken amendments to corporate data. He said the organisations continued to be plagued by historic backlogs.

The report also said it took Cipro five days to register a new company and that, by the end of March last year, the search for, and examination of, trade marks took 19 months.

In 2004-05, there were at least 36845 new company registrations and 135438 of close corporations.

Angel said that while much good work had been done "the system availability and response times were generally unacceptable".

"The increasing dependency on IT expanding with e-business will only exacerbate the current problems," he said.

However, he expressed hope that new strategies and resources would help take a quantum leap forward to make things better in the new financial year.

"The successful execution of these strategies is at the very heart of Cipro's future and credibility," Angel said.

Cipro said it had introduced the electronic lodgement of documents for business registrations to improve turnaround times and alleviate congestion. It had also established an electronic interface with the South African Revenue Service databases for the sharing of information.

The auditor-general's report, included in the annual report, highlighted Cipro's R4,8m accumulated deficit as at end-March last year and noted that it had reported operational deficits for two consecutive years.

The report said this was due to lack of controls to ensure that "budgets were not exceeded".