2022 Federal Budget - ASIC fees to be scrapped from September 2023

The removal of the following ASIC fees was announced in the 2022 Federal Budget as part of the Modernising Business Registers (MBR) program:

• ASIC company annual late review fees. This is a welcome move, particularly for small companies, which are more likely to incur these fees due to oversight.  Late review fees may also act as a disincentive for companies (particularly small ones), to update their details on the ASIC database if they miss a lodgement deadline, which makes the database prone to being inaccurate and out of date, and therefore less useful.
• ASIC search fees.  The abolition of fees payable by the public to search the ASIC database for information about companies (for example, registration status, registered office address, names of directors and shareholdings) will align Australia with other countries such as the US, UK and New Zealand, where (unlike the current position in Australia) a lot of information about a company can be obtained by anyone from Government databases for free. However, the scrapping of search fees may not good news for third party providers of company search services, who may lose some business.
• Some “ad hoc” company lodgement fees.  The Budget papers did not specify which ones are to be scrapped, but evidently some lodgement fees will continue to apply.

The abolition of the above fees is scheduled to take effect from September 2023, coinciding with the new Australian Business Registry Services (ABRS) platform becoming operational.  Established as part of the MBR program, the ABRS will result in the consolidation of more than 30 ASIC registers and the Australian Business Register (ABR) into one place.

The Budget papers say that the Government will forgo revenue of $64.9 million over 3 years from 2023-24 to streamline fees associated with Australia’s Business Registers, as companies are migrated to the new ABRS platform.