Company registration goes paperless

The Registrar General Department (RGD) has successfully implemented the online registration of businesses, issuance of certificates to commence business, and the registration of marriages.

This means that the online operations of the RGD, which faced some challenges initially when it was deployed in 2014, is now fully accessible online.

This allows prospective company owners to go online and register their companies and make payments without having to visit the offices of the RGD.

The paperless system at the Department is in line with Government’s commitment to deepen the paperless regime to improve the ease of doing business in Ghana and to enhance the business competitiveness of the country.

Information available to the B&FT shows that there are number of functions on the new platform which are supported by a number of services on-line, which allow company searches, reservation of company names and the booking of marriage ceremonies amongst others.

As at June 2017 over 6,855 online transactions had been conducted via the Registrar General Department’s portal

Linked to the RGD portal is a fully functional e-payment platform which allows payments to be made in the course of online transactions.

Another interesting new feature introduced by the RGD is the processes which facilitates the search or requests for data regarding companies registered in Ghana by the deployment of the e-shop information platform.

The e-shop platforms is an end-to-end registration portals developed and deployed by GCNet as part of the broad World Bank sponsored e-Gov project.

It is worth to not that, currently the RGD systems are integrated with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) with plans far advanced to link up with Ghana Investment Promotion Centre in the exchange of data to facilitate the ease of doing business in Ghana.

The data exchange is to encourage a paperless registration and tax regime aimed at significantly reducing administrative and operational overhead costs.

Doris Ampadu-Ameyaw, Head of IT, the Registrar General Department, hints that in line with the commitment to enhance and enrich customer experience, the outfit is in the process of implementing a queue management system at the front office to improve the customer experience.