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The DA welcomes the turnaround at the Companies and Intellectual Property Commission (CIPC) and commends Minister Rob Davies and the Companies Commissioner, Astrid Ludin, for the reduction in the transaction backlog from 50 000 in the middle of July to 6 700 at the end of August.

We are pleased that the Commission has adopted our suggestion to solve the problems in the call centre by outsourcing it, and to introduce service level agreements to guarantee service levels by December. These interventions will help us get to the position where we can analyse the speed of business registrations against competitor countries, rather than the size of our registration backlogs.

We also welcome the fact that the Commission appears to have scaled up registrations without compromising security. Several South African companies have historically experienced financial losses because of breaches in security, so we are pleased that the Minister has today committed to a zero tolerance approach to such breaches.

The Commissioner has committed to outsourcing the call centre by December this year, but she should endeavour to do this earlier. The call centre is still 22 agents short of a full staff component, and because of this 55% of the 45 500 calls received in August 2011 were not picked up. This is simply unacceptable.

In addition, the number of vacancies in the Commission itself has increased from 46 in July to 56 in August. The Commissioner has relied on incentives for the existing staff – as well as secondees from the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants – to roll back the backlog, but ultimately she needs to make sure the Commission is fully staffed and able to provide a world-class service to the South African economy.