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ACCOUNTABILITY, TRANSPARENCY AND DISCLOSURE

There has, over recent years, been a steady increase in regulatory, compliance and
reporting requirements for directors in South Africa.
Section 33: Annual Returns
Annual returns must be submitted by every category of company including external
companies in the prescribed form with the prescribed fee and within 30 business days
after the anniversary date of its date of incorporation (in the case of a company that
was incorporated in the Republic, or the date that its registration was transferred to the
Republic, in the case of a domesticated company). A CC is required to file its annual
return within the anniversary month of its incorporation up until the month thereafter.
An annual return is a statutory return in terms of the Act and therefore must be complied
with. Failure to do so will result in the Commission assuming that the company is not
doing business, and may lead to deregistration. Companies which are required in
terms of the Act to have their financial statements audited must file a copy of the latest
approved audited financial statements together with their annual return, in iXBRL format.
Companies (and CC’s) that are required to produce audited AFS’s in terms of the
Companies Act (in other words, “statutory audits”), are those that fall within the following
categories:
■ All public companies and State-Owned companies
■ Companies that have an explicit stipulation in their MOI that they should audit their
AFS’s
■ Companies whose Public Interest Score is 350 or more
■ Companies that in the ordinary course of their primary activities, hold assets in a
fiduciary capacity for person who are not related to them, and the aggregate value of
such assets held at any time during the financial year exceeds R5 million.
The Act also requires that the following companies are required to be audited: A Non-
Profit Company created by the State, or for the State, and a Company whose Public
Interest Score is between 100–349, and whose annual financial statements have been
internally compiled.
iXBRL involves a digital file format for the reporting of a company’s AFS, and replaces the
PDF document. It makes it easier for companies to report their financial information in an
electronic format, and for the Commission to analyse the data submitted, as the iXBRL
format creates uniformity amongst all financial reports. The Commission mandated the
digital reporting system for all qualifying entities from 1 July 2018.

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