Set up a PPSR Alert

I put up a post last month detailing how to conduct a search on the PPSR – primarily aimed at helping businesses keep abreast of any registrations that might have been lodged against them. 

By way of a companion piece, I thought I’d now write about how you can get an automatic alert from the PPSR any time someone lodges a registration against you.  The alert won’t give you any details beyond letting you know that a new registration has been made but at least it will save you from having to make unnecessary searches on the off-chance a new registration might have been lodged.

Anyone can sign up for a PPSR alert and the service is entirely free of charge.

First go to https://transact.ppsr.gov.au/ppsr/Home

From there, use the menu tab to navigate from Subscriptions to Alert notifications to Create alert notification request as below:

Once there, you’ll be asked to enter (and then re-enter) the email address to which you want your alert to be sent:

If you have a Business to Government link set up (most of you won’t) you can also enter details here to have alerts sent to your B2G mailbox:

Otherwise you can just leave this blank.

You are then prompted to set up a name for your Alert as well as the length of time you want the Alert to remain active – the PPSR will present you with a default name and use the current date as a start date with the alert to run for a year -  this will be fine for most but can easily be amended.

Proceeding to the next page, you’ll then be asked to identify the Grantor on which you want the alert - this will be you if you're checking up on people lodging against you.  

There are a couple of things to note here, firstly, the alert system can only be set up for Grantors that have either an ACN, ARBN or ARSN – which means no alerts can be set up on sole traders, partnerships, trusts, Governmental entities or indeed any organisation without one of those three identifiers.  On the plus side, however, you can add multiple Grantors to the same alert.

Simply choose the relevant identifier (this will usually be the ACN), hit the Verify button to make sure you’ve not made a typo and then Add to place the Grantor on your list of Alert candidates.

Keep doing this until you get bored.

You have now set up your Alert and all that is needed for it to be activated is clicking on Next> at the bottom right of the screen.   

When I first went through this process I was expecting to go to a screen asking me to review all that I’d entered and confirm that I wanted to go ahead and activate the Alert but, although you are taken to a ‘Confirmation’ screen, the Alert has already been set up by this point.

The confirmation email to which the above screen refers arrives promptly and looks as follows:

Keep this email safe or, at least, keep the Alert Notification Request number handy as this acts in tandem with your email address to allow you access to maintain or delete the Alert notification you have set up - as you can see from the below screencap I took when cancelling the Alert notifications I’d set up on the OneSteel companies:

As I said at the outset, the alert the PPSR sends you won’t tell you very much but at least it will act as a prompt to conduct a fresh search if you don’t already have a good idea as to what the new registration might relate to.

Registering against Trusts

It’s been well over 4 years since I last dedicated a post here to the issue of trusts, so, while the earlier article still holds up well, it’s probably about time I revisited the subject and freshened up what we know.

Firstly, I’ll preface what follows with Recommendation 110 from the Official Review of the Personal Property Securities Act completed just over 2 years ago and, as far as I can tell, no closer to having the vast majority of its 394 recommendations adopted.

Recommendation 110: That the Regulations be amended so that a registration to perfect a security interest over trust assets should be made against the relevant details for the trustee, rather than the ABN or other identifying details for the trust.

Why did the Official Review make this recommendation?

Well, let’s look at what the rules for registration look like when a Trust is involved.

Unfortunately, those rules won’t be found in the Personal Property Securities Act itself, but in the Personal Property Securities Regulations 2010,  wherein you will be treated to some of the most convoluted ‘guidance’ I’ve come across in relation to the PPSA.

 

To save you the agony, I’ve summarised the key guidance:

• If the Trustee is a corporate body and has an ARSN (Australian Registered Scheme Number – pretty unlikely for trade credit transactions) then the registration should be lodged against the 9 digit ARSN.
• If the Trustee is any other kind of body (or individual) and the relevant Trust has an ABN, the registration should be lodged against the Trust’s ABN (this is probably the most likely scenario).
• If the Trustee is a corporate body but its Trust does not have an ABN (unlikely) then the registration should be lodged against the Trustee’s ACN.
• If the Trustee is an individual but the Trust does not have an ABN, then registrations should be against the individual’s details – usually, full name and date of birth.

The first problem that springs to mind lies with simply knowing whether the company that is interested in becoming your customer is acting as a Trustee or not.  Your potential customer may simply omit mentioning that they are acting on behalf of a Trust.  How is the poor supplier to know?

While the supplier may discover that there is a Trust, not knowing whether the potential customer is acting in their capacity as Trustee or purchasing in their own right will either leave the supplier open to opting for the wrong type of registration or going to the trouble and expense of lodging two registrations ‘just to be safe’.

Where does the supplier stand if goods are supplied to a company with a Trust that doesn’t have an ABN (and thus registered against the ACN of the company) only to find out later that an ABN has since been obtained for the Trust? 

Interestingly, the same rules that apply to identifying Grantors also apply to identifying Secured Parties when setting up their Secured Party Groups on the Register.  However, while failing to identify the Grantor in absolute accordance with the PPSA’s rules may lead to the registration being deemed ineffective, the situation is not as dire when it comes to identifying Secured Parties. 

As found in Future Revelation Ltd v Medica Radiology & Nuclear Medicine Pty Ltd[2013] NSWSC 1741, the determining factor will be whether the registration would be revealed during a properly conducted search – while it would not be found in the case of a wrongly identified Grantor, an incorrectly identified Secured Party’s registration would still show up in Grantor based search results.

In summary, where Trusts are involved, the PPSA’s registration rules are horrible, ill-conceived and confusing but… we’re stuck with them for the foreseeable future and, as far as companies are concerned, I advocate a belt & braces approach of lodging registrations against both the Trust ABN and the Trustee’s ACN.