Corporate affairs ministry to test new MCA21 portal's Version 3 soon

The corporate affairs ministry will start rigorous testing of its new MCA21 portal’s Version 3, which is expected to be launched by the end of this financial year. The ministry is taking every precaution to avoid the probl­ems like those faced by the recently launched new income-tax portal.

“IT projects are large, and there can be teething problems. We would make sure everything goes glitch-free. We have not faced any problem after the launch of phase one of the new MCA 21 portal. We will start field testing soon,” a senior government official said. The new version is being operated by L&T Infotech. 

“Even the transition from Infosys to L&T Infotech has been glitch-free. We are testing user acceptance to make sure stakeholders are not inconv­enienced,” the senior government official added. The new MCA21 version 3 portal is expected to use artificial intelligence in a big way to improve user experience and strengthen the enforcement mechanisms, from online filings and hearings to early detection of fraud e-scrutiny, and compliance management system for companies.

The main purpose of the portal is to facilitate seamless integration and data exchange among regulators.

A revamped website with an e-book facility was launched in May. The data analytics-driven system, as the ministry describes it, will make filings for the companies easier and enable early detection of lapses in filings.

Through an automated system, the government will keep a close watch on ratios such as debt to turnover, inventory to turnover, or loan to assets as early red flags.

This new version would have a compliance management system or the CMS for identifying non-compliant companies and LLPs, issuing e-notices to the said defaulting entities and generating alerts for internal users of MCA.

The government is setting up a central scrutiny centre, built into this new system that would pull up companies where the system detects any suspicious activity on a list of parameters being finalised by the corporate affairs ministry.

The findings will also help in building a risk profiling system for companies. The central scrutiny centre will be the first port of call once a warning is triggered. The matter will be handed to the concerned registrar of companies for further investigation if required. The ministry will set up a new position of registrar of the central scrutiny centre.

This centre will scrutinise certain Straight Through Process Forms filed by the corporates on the MCA21 registry and flag the companies for more in depth scrutiny.

The portal will also be used for e-consultation on proposed amendments and draft rules.

The introduction of MCA21, experts say, will push forward the role of the government as an enforcer of law, leaving clerical work such as filing of documents to artificial intelligence-based automated systems.

As part of the Version 3 of MCA21, a MCA LAB is being set up, which will consist of corporate law experts to evaluate the effectiveness of the system. In an earlier statement, MCA had said: “The project will have micro-services architecture with high scalability and capabilities for advanced analytics.”

Key components of MCA21 Version 3

• E-Scrutiny
• E-adjudication
• E-consultation
• Compliance management system
• MCA lab of corporate law experts