PPSA register commenced on 30 January 2012 but it's not all smooth sailing
The national Personal Property Securities (PPS) Register commenced on Monday, 30 January 2012. The new single online national register replaces (either wholly or in part) many of the existing State or Commonwealth registers for recording security interests over personal property such as the ASIC register of charges. In relation to charges, historical charge information (eg charges that have been satisfied), will remain on the ASIC register and will be available for searching for 7 years. But there have been a few glitches in implementation:
- on 28 and 29 January 2012, due to technical issues arising during the migration process, ASIC reported that approximately 6,000 ASIC charges were not migrated to the PPS Register. ASIC has contacted approximately 4,000 lodging parties of those charges and is in the process of notifying the remaining affected parties.
- 38,000 charges which had been released before 30 January 2012 are showing as current on the PPS Register. This should be corrected by April but in the meantime, ASIC's list of these charges should be checked to confirm whether a charge is actually current; and
- 27,000 registrations with multiple secured parties are only showing one secured party. The PPS Register is seeking comments on an options paper to address this, but in the meantime, you should check the attachments (if available) to determine the secured parties.
You may need to search both the PPS Register and the ASIC Register (as well as the list of released charges) to get the full history of charges registered against a company.
If you are searching for security interests registered against a company, also consider the list of non-migrated charges as they will be given priority even though they do not appear on the PPS Register.
See ASIC release on non-migrated charges.
See the options paper, on multiple secured parties.
See ASIC's list, the Satisfied Charges Data.
