On 11 March 2021, CA ANZ with CPAA provided a joint submission to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) paper proposing an extension to 24 months for financial reporting and AGM relief for companies under external administration. 

We acknowledged that meeting these obligations before an administrator has established a company’s financial affairs was an unnecessary cost. Equally, the purpose of entering external administration is to resolve the future of a company quickly. 

We proposed extending the relief to 12 months to provide adequate time for the administrator to determine the financial affairs of a company and provide meaningful financial reports to an AGM.

We did not support the additional conditions ASIC sought to impose or that administrators should make reports compiled for, and lodged to, ASIC available for free to the public.

Instead, we iterated our previous joint position that reports received and published by ASIC should be accessible free of charge to the public.

We would like to thank the members of CA ANZ and CPAA for contributing to our submission.