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Companies

When ASIC initiates a company’s deregistration

Key points:

  • There are some reasons under the law that we can initiate deregistration of a company. We call this an ‘ASIC-initiated deregistration’.
  • The most common reason is that the company is more than a year late paying its annual review fee.
  • A company may be able to stop an ASIC-initiated deregistration in progress by paying the fees.
  • A creditor can ask ASIC to delay or stop deregistration so they can be paid or to take legal action against the company.
  • If you want to deregister your company, wind it up or use the voluntary deregistration process.

What deregistration means

Deregistration means that your company no longer exists as a legal entity. You can apply to do this yourself as a voluntary deregistration to avoid continuing to have to pay ASIC annual fees. If you do not meet the requirements for voluntary deregistration, you may need an external administrator to wind up the company before it is deregistered. In some cases, ASIC may initiate the deregistration of a company.

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Why ASIC may initiate deregistration

The most common reason we initiate a company’s deregistration is because it has not paid its annual review fee in full for at least 12 months after the due date.

There are other reasons that we may initiate a deregistration, such as when a company has ceased operating a business or has not paid the industry funding levies.

How ASIC deregisters a company

We take the following steps to tell you that we are deregistering a company:

  1. Send a letter to the company, the company’s directors and any liquidators about the pending deregistration. This will include information about what to do to stop the process.
  2. Update the company’s status on the company register to ‘strike off in progress’.
  3. Post a notice that we will deregister the company in 2 months on our Published notices website.

After the 2 months have passed since we posted the notice, we may deregister the company. If the company is deregistered, we will notify everyone who was notified of the deregistration in progress.

Notices remain on the Published notices website, even if we stop deregistration.

Defer or stop the deregistration of a company

You may be able to defer or stop an ASIC-initiated deregistration if you act within 2 months of our notice.

You may be able to stop a deregistration in progress by paying a company’s outstanding fees, penalties or levies, depending on the reasons we are deregistering the company.

A creditor or other third party can request ASIC to defer deregistration of a company for an initial period of 30 days.

During this 30 days, you can ask us to further defer or stop deregistration. You must have started, or plan to start, legal proceedings against the company. We will defer deregistration so you can complete the proceedings.

To defer or stop deregistration, contact us and tell us:

  • the name and Australian Company Number (ACN) of the company we are deregistering
  • the reason you want to stop deregistration, with any supporting evidence
  • your postal address.

Reinstatement

In some cases, you may be able to apply to reinstate a deregistered company’s registration:

Reinstating a company after deregistration

Reinstatement means that a company continues to exist as if it had not been deregistered. Directors before the deregistration become directors again from the reinstatement and are subject to the duties and obligations of directors.