How to Renew a PPSR Registration

As seen in my last post, we're rapidly approaching the time where many suppliers will be needing to renew registrations they put in place shortly after the start of the PPSR in 2012.

Renewal should be a straightforward process. 

Individual PPSR Brokers will probably have different approaches to the activity but the following shows the step by step process involved in renewing your registrations directly on the PPSR website.

In order to attempt this, you will need to have already established an account with the PPSR – this is a requirement for setting up an SPG but might have been avoided if the supplier’s SPG was set up for them by an intermediary that already had a PPSR account.

The following steps show the process once you have navigated to the PPSR and logged into your account.

Access your Secured Party Group (SPG) and click on the Group Registrations tab:

Use the 'Other filter options' to select a suitable range of expiry dates:

This will generate a screen showing all registrations due to expire within the selected time frame.

Select the registration you want to renew and click on the renew button:

Unfortunately, for reasons that are not entirely clear, if you make multiple selections, ie, you have a number of registrations that need to be renewed, the ‘Renew’ button becomes greyed out and unavailable!  In other words, registrations can only be renewed one-by-one, so it could be a bit of a slog if you have a lot of registrations expiring at the same time.

Once the Renew button is clicked you’ll be asked to choose a new expiry date and be given the opportunity to review the details of the registration being renewed:

It’s a little annoying that while the PPSR allows for simple selections for 25 year and indefinite registrations, it doesn’t allow for a simple 7-year registration – instead, the PPSR requires the user to manually enter a 7-year expiry.

You should also note that, when setting the expiry date for, say, 7 years, the 7 year period counts from the current day’s date and NOT the original expiry date. 

After that, it’s a simple matter of confirming the renewal and paying the renewal fee (which will be exactly the same as if a new registration were being lodged):

While it should only take a minute to renew a registration, make sure you don’t cut things too fine and miss the expiry date.  Registrations that have already expired cannot be renewed!

Obviously, a third party PPSR Services provider should be able to provide bulk renewal facilities along with an alert process warning of impending expiries and their own renewal processes are likely to work quite differently.

UPDATE: AFSA has now told me that, following my whinge suggestion that a simple 7-year expiry selection should be available for renewals, they have implemented that change.  Renewals will now be a little bit easier... which is nice.

Migrated Security Interests - back in focus!

When the PPSR first started it was immediately populated by a number of registrations representing security interests that had been migrated across from other registers.  

Initially, we were promised that the PPSR would, effectively, absorb the role of 70 national and state registers although, in the end, substantially fewer registers had data moved across.

Unfortunately, the migration exercise was not entirely successful and statutory provisions had to be introduced in order to confer legitimacy on registrations that, in any other circumstances, would have been deemed ineffective.

With the 5^th anniversary of the PPSR, at the end of January 2017, those statutory provisions are scheduled to lapse. 

This means that any PPSR registrations you have that had originally been lodged on an older register will need to be checked to ensure their continued effectiveness.

So what type of problems might there be?

One relatively well publicised issue, when the PPSR first started, revolved around security interests with multiple secured parties.

While an original lodgement on ASIC’s register of company charges might have shown that ABC P/L, DEF P/L and GHI P/L all shared in the same security interest against a debtor/grantor, when transfer to the PPSR took place, only ABC P/L might have been shown as the secured party.  Apparently, some 27,000 registrations are thought to fall in this category!

Another problem arises from the PPSA’s very strict rules regarding how a debtor/grantor should be identified.  

These rules do not necessarily align very well with those used by the original registers.  For example, most registers would not have deemed a Trust as having sufficient legal capacity to grant a security interest and would thus have required any registration to be lodged against the trustee of that trust as opposed to the trust itself.  However, the PPSA pretty much requires registrations to be lodged against the ABN of the trust rather than its trustee.

Similarly, ABNs will have commonly been used to identify corporate grantors on pre-PPSR registers whereas the PPSA requires such to be identified by their ACN, if they have one, or their full legal name if they do not.

Registrations that don’t identify grantors by their proper, PPSA legislated, identifiers are almost certainly likely to be considered ineffective.

The PPSA also has specific rules for identifying motor vehicles, watercraft, aircraft (including various bits of aircraft) and certain intellectual property rights by serial numbers in order to be fully effective.  There will undoubtedly be a great number of instances where those serial numbers were not migrated across from their originating registers.

If you have any security interests that were ‘automatically’ brought across from another register at the start of the PPSR, you only have a matter of weeks left to make sure they meet the PPSA’s requirements before they lose any ‘artificial’ effectiveness the subsequent statutory provisions may have conferred.