Making Amendments on the PPSR

It is obviously very important to get the details of your PPSR registration correct at the time of registration but every now and then an error will be made or information omitted that might be more helpful to others if it were to be included.  And thus, the prudent security holder will need to lodge an amendment.

The PPSR accepts that amendments might be necessary and breaks amendments down into three categories:  minor, major and benign.

Minor amendments will involve such things as:

• adding or changing a collateral description text (for most collateral classes this is an optional free-text field of up to 500 characters);
• adding or changing a Giving of Notice Identifier (effectively, a customer reference field);
• or re-describing a proceeds description (this is automatically defaulted by the PPSR to ‘all present & after acquired property’).

Minor amendments will be charged at $3.40 by the PPSR.

Major amendments involve, as the label suggests, more substantive changes to the registration.  The most obvious examples of these will be the extension of a registration’s expiry period and the addition of a grantor.

Major amendments are charged as if they were a fresh registration, that is, equivalent to the length of the expiry period ie, $6.80 for a 7 year registration period, $34.00 for a period of between 7 and 25 years and $119.00 for an indefinite period.

Benign amendments (my term, not the PPSR’s) are what would otherwise be major amendments that have the effect of lessening or reducing the nature of the registration.  Examples will include:

• Reducing the length of a registration period;
• Removing a grantor where the registration identifies more than one grantor; and
• Discharging a registration (this is effectively the same as the first ‘benign’ example as the mechanism for discharge is to bring the expiry date forwards to the current date).

Benign amendments although major in nature do not attract a charge from the PPSR.

Other potentially amendable registration elements such as:

• toggling the Purchase Money Security Interest (PMSI) flag;
• changing the collateral class; or
• re-designating collateral as inventory

are not permissible amendments. 

Quite why this should be the case is not clear. Why should it be allowable to change the identity of who is granting the security interest but it not be possible to change the collateral of that security interest?

But by far the biggest inconsistency with the PPSR’s approach to amendments rests with its pricing structure.

I’ve got no problem with the PPSR attempting to recover a contribution towards its development and maintenance costs by charging for amendments and, once we get past the ‘minor’ amendments, the idea of aligning charging with the price of an equivalent registration has some merit; however, why is this approach not applied consistently where Transitional registrations are involved?

If I lodge a transitional security interest with no stated end date the PPSR will not charge me.  If I then realise that I failed to include an additional grantor on my registration and try to correct that error via an amendment the PPSR will charge me $119.00 for the privilege!

*While the work around will be to discharge the incorrect registration (no PPSR fee) and register a fresh Transitional security interest (again no PPSR fee) it seems a nonsense that two separate free PPSR transactions should need to be used as a more reasonable alternative to a single transaction amendment charged at $119.00.

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Re * above, while my workaround was appropriate at the time of writing, the PPSR's decision to start charging for transitional registrations from 1st July 2015 onwards pretty much invalidates this as a practical solution.

Note: Edited to reflect new PPSR charges introduced on 1st July 2013.
         Further edited to (belatedly) keep up with current PPSR pricing (12/2016)