Online Transactions At Registrar - General’s Department Increases By 374 Percent

Accra: October 18, 2017: The Registrar-General’s Department (RGD) has successfully implemented the online registration of companies, as well as the authorization of operations of businesses.

These functions are supported by a number of services on-line, including the e-Shop which allows company searches, reservation of company names and the booking of marriage ceremonies amongst others. This has resulted in significant uptake by Ghanaian businesses using the paperless system. By the first half of the year, over 6,855 online transactions were conducted via the Registrar-General’s Department portal.

There has been substantial growth in annual online transaction numbers, from a mere 102 in 2015, to around 3000 in 2016 to over 11,015 from January to September 2017. There has been over 60,000 businesses and companies registered with RGD in the period from January to September this year, compared to a figure for the whole of 2016 of 54,000. Revenue generated by September 2017 at 44 million Ghana Cedis, already matches that collected from January to December 2016.

The Head of IT at the Registrar-Generals Department, Doris Ampadu-Ameyaw explained that businesses can conduct their end-to-end business registration on the RGD portal, resulting in the issuance of an e-certificate.

“Linked to the RGD portal is a fully functional e-payment platform which allows payments to be made in the course of online transactions. This is in line with Government’s commitment to deepen leveraging technology to improve the ease of doing business in Ghana and to enhance the business competitiveness of the country,” she said.

According to Mrs. Ampadu-Ameyaw an interesting new feature introduced to the automation of the RGD processes is the deployment of the e-shop information platform, which facilitates the search or requests for data regarding companies registered in Ghana.

She hints that in line with the commitment to enhance and enrich customer experience the outfit was in the process of implementing a queue management system at the front office to improve the Customer experienced. This she said will give true meaning to the ease of doing business.

The e-certificate and e-shop platforms are end to end registration portals developed and deployed by GCNet as part of the broad World Bank sponsored e-Gov project. It leverages ICT opportunities to generate employment enhancement and growth under the e-Gov application for the Revenue Generating Agencies and the Registrar General’s Department. RGD systems are integrated with the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) with plans to advance to link up with Ghana Investment Promotion Centre in the exchange of data to facilitate the ease of doing business in Ghana.

The data exchange is to encourage a paperless registration and tax regime aimed at significantly reducing administrative and operational overhead costs. It will greatly ease doing business, while maximising revenue mobilisation for accelerated development.

The e-Certificate is expected be launched on 19^th October, 2017.