More than half of registered private companies are yet to disclose details of beneficial owners, including names and residential addresses, hurting the State’s push to curb corruption involving public tenders.
Data from the Business Registration Service (BRS), the custodian of a list of all companies and information for entities registered in Kenya, shows only 43.05 per cent of the private firms had declared their business ownership status at the end of June 2023.
The proportion of firms with declared ownership status was up from 36.1 per cent in the year ended June 2022 and is despite BRS conducting outreach activities to emphasize the obligations of companies in line with the Beneficial Ownership Information Regulations of 2020
“The service did not meet the target due to system change and upgrade hitch which slowed the process,” says BRS in the budget proposal report to the National Treasury.
The law requires new firms to fill the Beneficial Ownership Information e-register at the companies’ registry ahead of registration and existing firms to comply within the set timelines in what marked a major shakeup of shareholders records.